bktheirregular | Entries tagged with rant

Senior Partner: "Are those translations almost done?"
Me: "They're going to take a week at least."
Senior Partner: "I thought they were going to be done by Wednesday."
Me: "No. That just can't be done."
Senior Partner: "Wednesday - that's what you told me."

I may have said Wednesday at the earliest - but apparently Wednesday's what stuck in the Senior Partner's head.

And that wouldn't be happening without a time machine, even if I worked nonstop every hour since I got the task. That's also not taking into account the flat-out illegible portions of the original text. (I'm working off a photocopy of a photocopy, and probably several more generations removed from the original.)

Never again. I swear I am never again giving even a guess at an estimated time to completion on a requested job until I've put in at least a day's work on it.

Current Mood: stressed
Current Location: Athens, Attica
Crossposts: http://bktheirregular.livejournal.com/573582.html

If anyone hears inarticulate screaming coming from the eastern Mediterranean in the next few days, don't worry. It's (probably) not another riot, just your friendly correspondent venting frustration with translating a book's worth of agreements so poorly written as to border on the incoherent.

Case in point: "200,000 in share capital." 200,000 what? The thing was written pre-euro, so it would naturally seem to be drachma, but since the drachma was worth less than one red cent when this agreement was written (and that's being generous with the exchange rates), you're talking less than two thousand bucks in share capital for the whole limited-liability company. Which goes back to one of the core tenets of law school: if something sounds wrong, something's probably wrong, and you just need to figure out what it is.

It's one of those days where my needs boil down to a Halligan tool and an appropriate kneecap to thwack with it.

Current Mood: annoyed
Crossposts: http://bktheirregular.livejournal.com/571962.html

So the star of my previous work rant swung by:

"How's that task coming?"
"Working on it."
"How far do you have to go?"
"Half a page."
"What?! How long was it?"
"It's two pages."
"And you're not done yet?"
"Yeah, well, I had another task that took priority."

New rule. If you unceremoniously drop something on me and blithely assume I'm going to make it Priority 1? I won't. It'll be Priority 2, dropping down the priority stack based on who else gives me stuff and explains how soon it needs to be done and why (and also based on how obnoxious you were about your demand).

This country is in desperate need of a reality check, but so many kneecaps, so few baseball bats, so little time...

Current Mood: annoyed
Crossposts: http://bktheirregular.livejournal.com/571683.html

Yeah, yeah, "Greeks behaving badly" is more the rule than the exception hereabouts.

Got a call on my cell phone while out grabbing a bite of lunch - a certain colleague in the firm (star of past rants in this space) needs a translation done. About one page, as soon as possible. This wouldn't be a problem except for a few factors:

1) I'm already working a high priority task for one of the partners.
2) That high priority task has pushed aside another translation I've been grinding away at, which the person who gave me that one is already starting to ask about.
3) My work computer's been giving me problems all week, to the point where it locked up completely yesterday in the middle of yet another emergency top-priority task. That led me to ... er ... kick the thing. Which crashed the hard disk and left me calling for the IT guy. He got it back up and running, and told me to keep the tower away from the side of my desk to keep up airflow and prevent it from overheating. If he noticed the dent in the side of the machine, he didn't say anything about it.
4) I've got partners in the office shouting. Again.
5) I finally got that message from the associate. Well, I got *a* message. Without any attached letter to translate. I immediately shot back a reply that the document needing translation was missing. No response yet.

So it's back to Priority Task #2 for me, dealing with yet another bunch of yahoos who seem to have that whole "rules were made to be broken" attitude tattoed on their hindbrains, waiting for the next tantrum to blow up in one or another of the offices of the partners who never seem to close their doors when they get their scream on, playing my iPod loud enough to drown out the voices (which is probably loud enough to cause hearing damage), and basically one disaster away from screaming at the entire office to shut up and let the people who aren't shouting get on with their work.

And next week there's more protests coming. May Day, labor and such, traditional marches and whatnot. Plus upcoming elections, in which I'd seriously vote for Bill the Cat if I knew how to write him onto the ballot.

Is it Friday yet?

Current Location: Athens, Attica
Crossposts: http://bktheirregular.livejournal.com/571481.html

I may be somewhat ranty for the next couple of days or so. Aside from the whole protest thing, I just got handed a document to translate - no, to summarize - on data-processing systems integration.

Problems:

1) To summarize, I need to comprehend the whole thing, which often means translating the whole thing, which means that summarizing can take longer than a straight-up translation. Although I'm winging it and trying to muddle through.
2) They're using acronyms left and right, in both Greek and English (and maybe German as well) without defining them. There was literally one acronym I could decipher without doing a wiki walk: IBM.

Yeah, it's getting to the point where I want to track down the author of said document. With a baseball bat.

(Except that they don't have baseball bats in Greece last I checked.)

(Or cricket bats.)

(And I'd probably be arrested if I tried to import one.)

(I just want to find the person who wrote that mishmash and turn their skull concave. Is that so wrong?)

(Oh, yeah, and the office closes down at 6:30. For safety reasons. So this fifteen-pages-of-gobbledygook document had to be summarized in less than two hours.)

(I guess accuracy gets sacrificed to speed today.)

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Location: Athens, Attica

So after I-lost-track-of-how-many months of negotiation and brinksmanship, the European Community figured out some sort of debt relief plan for Greece. Short-term pain, hopefully somewhat longer-term stability. The population is desperately unhappy, but let's face it: the country is in a place where there aren't any ~~good~~ painless policy choices at the moment.

So I imagine that my reaction on hearing the news was probably replicated all over the place.

The news: The Prime Minister is going to put the debt-relief agreement up to a referendum vote by the Greek populace.

The reaction, probably punctuated by desks being hit by heads representing about thirty-two-point-eight zillion dollars of at-risk, heh, "investments", was a groan that in any language translates to "oh, crap."

The governing party - PASOK, the Socialists - hopes that the people will, heh, choose wisely. The primary opposition party - Nea Dimokratia, New Democracy, the Conservatives - say that there needs to be a snap election, not to decide on the policy, but to change the government. One of the splinter radical parties, SYRIZA, says there's no point to elections. (Can't quite suss out their logic; something like "meet the new boss, same as the old boss", maybe? Because both major parties bear an enormous amount of responsibility, so to speak, for painting the country into this corner.)

And the Communists, who command the more radical trade unions, want to hold rallies and basically discredit the entire system of governance.

I remember a discussion with my mother and my aunt over the sort of things that happened the last time the Communists tried to do things their way in parts of the country. To give you an idea of how bad it was, when they talk about the Greek Civil War, that's the period they're talking about.

Basically, the Communists demanded fealty and support from everyone in areas they controlled, the older generation said - and they'd lived through it, remember.

Me: "[You support us or you'll get your throat cut, right?]"
My aunt: "[No, they'd gouge out people's eyes.]"

In short, who to trust? I got no clue. None of the parties have given any reason for confidence. The firebomb-throwing anarchists think things will be just peachy if they're allowed to burn down everything that represents the current system - conveniently neglecting that fire spreads, and there's empirical evidence that their fires kill.

Oh, yeah.

This is gonna suck.

Current Mood: depressed
Current Location: Athens, Attica

A long time ago, there was a Sunday strip of "Bloom County" that dealt with the diminishing returns of exclusionism.

Er, in plain English, it showed what happens when you keep dividing the world between "Us" and "Them". I forget the exact divisions that were used, countries, religions, philosophies, what have you, but more and more people kept getting excluded.

In one of the Presidential races, something's starting to percolate, like a toxic witch's brew. It's about religion.

More and more, it's about which is the right religion. The President is vilified for supposedly being part of a non-Christian faith, even in the face of loads of evidence. And among the challengers, in order to pass muster, you must be overtly part of the right religious faith.

But which faith is that?

One of the leading candidates is a Mormon. And that faith is being torn down as not being "Christian". As being a "cult".

So the definition of "the right religion" narrows. And who gets excluded next time? Which sect becomes "Them" as opposed to "Us" next?

In Greece, the Greek Orthodox Church has preferred status. Christianity is written into the Greek constitution as the official religion. I've mentioned my experiences in the army with religion - how I was "other", isolated from the full group, separated out from the crowd at the formal oath-swearing, sent to clean the latrines during church services, and ultimately ordered to undergo baptism - ordered to join the accepted religious creed, an order I only escaped because the clock ran out on my tour.

I don't want that to happen to my homeland - the mandating of a particular faith, the ostracizing of those who choose to believe or feel differently, even those like me who can't figure out where their faith should lie. (In the army, almost nobody could differentiate between an atheist and an agnostic.)

To all too many, it's not even enough that you believe; you've got to believe the right way, or you might as well not believe at all. Those signs that say "you can't have 'Good' without 'God'"? They're saying "if you don't believe in the proper way, you are evil."

And with every iteration, more and more are excluded. Believe or be damned. Convert or die.

It's not new. The Puritans did it; run out of England for adhering to a faith that didn't match the Church of England, they set up in Massachussetts and proceeded to turn around and impose the same intolerance.

(I always thought that logic was flat-out insane when I learned about it in school.)

(Maybe that's why I get queasy about home-schooling; the isolation from varying viewpoints is a good way to induce what they call epistemic closure.)

I do have some bias, though. I was brought up by people with a scientific frame of mind. I was exposed to a number of religions without being told explicitly which one was right. And as I grew older, I began to interpret Pascal's Wager a bit oddly:

It's not about choosing to believe or not, where the only nasty consequence comes of choosing not to believe and being wrong.

It's more like placing a bet on a roulette wheel. Where there are a thousand numbers on the table, and no edges, corners, colors, dozens, or other side bets are allowed. One chip, one number, one bet.

Oh, and when the wheel spins, it's got every one of those thousand numbers on it. Plus a trillion more that weren't even on the table.

Les jeux sont faits.

OK, maybe I'm a narrow-minded foreigner in this place, but Greek can handle subject-verb-object construction. Or even object-verbed-by-subject. Instead, I keep running into sentences in legal documents which are verb-subject-object, or verb-object-subject, and after five read-throughs, I still can't tell the subject from the object, and that sort of thing is kind of important in a legal document, you know what I mean?

If I'd handed in documents as poorly constructed as the ones I'm trying to translate, I'd have been failed out of whatever class I was taking. And it's not just a mediocre understanding of a foreign language; I've given some of these documents to native speakers who were baffled as to what the writers were trying to say.

One thing I miss in Athens: micro-coated aspirins. You can get aspirin, but only in blister packs, and they're the sort that taste like chalk when you try to swallow them...

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Location: Athens, Attica