bktheirregular

The day was starting out so well. My folks arrived Monday from New York, they had a nice couple of days enjoying my hospitality, and I saw them off to catch a boat to the islands. I went to work, started to get things organized, and then my office-mate asked for help with something.

In retrospect, that's the point where I should have run for the mountains surrounding the city.

First, he sent me two documents, one old in Greek and English, one new in English, telling me that the new document had to be completed by the end of today. I started to look over the new English document, finding problems all over the place in the English, and then realized ... the last Greek version I had didn't correspond to the latest English version at all. Meanwhile, I was being asked how much of the thing I could do by the end of the day - I decided to be conservative and say that I could probably handle about half of it (it's a long one, at 28 pages).

Except what he hadn't told me at the outset was that it didn't need to be edited; it needed to be translated. Into Greek. By the end of the day. All 28 pages.

Oh, and if I wanted to yell, I should go yell at the guy who'd given *him* the task.

So up I went, and when the guy who'd given out the task asked me if I had any questions about it, I decided to cut right to the point: "What happens if this thing isn't done by the end of today?"

The answer was that the client wouldn't be happy, that they wanted to sign this agreement tomorrow morning, but that it wouldn't be a disaster, but maybe a bunch of us could split up the task?

I took on a big chunk of it. With luck it'll be done by the end of the day, although the English copy is atrocious, and the old Greek copy isn't that great, either. My office-mate got thrown a piece of it, and he was complaining that the English was the worst he'd ever seen.

I think there's a growing consensus that the first step of translating this agreement into Greek should have been to translate it into English from whatever it was written in ... but I'm the only one who'd be qualified to do that, and I've already got too much on my plate.

I think this task might get done today. Assuming I work late. Assuming no more surprises.

The latter's not a safe assumption.

The past week has been busy - family visiting from New York for a couple of weeks, so that's pretty much chewed up my off-hours. Work was quiet, then got busy; it hasn't gotten crazy, and I hope that holds.

Grinding away at a project for which I don't have a deadline. Given Murphy's Law, I can only assume this means that there is a deadline, only I don't know what it is yet. Last time I got one of those, it was a big project with no set deadline, which changed to "deadline at opening of business tomorrow".

That happens every so often. I try not to throw chairs when it does.

Vacation was very nice. Getting up at half-past stupid o'clock on Christmas Day was unpleasant, but it allowed me to arrive in New York practically at midday - and since people don't usually designate Christmas Day itself as a travel day, the Van Wyck Expressway, the Grand Central Parkway, and the FDR Drive were almost entirely free of traffic - something which pretty much never happens.

So, afternoon and evening of Christmas were spent with family. Then a few days of recovery and errands (my trips Stateside are when I do things like get new eyeglasses), a trip down to Baltimore for New Year's Eve, then the snowstorm, then the fog, then a day of clearing weather, then the flight back to Athens.

Almost two full weeks, but they flew by. Very relaxing, though. And this time I remembered to build in an extra day of down-time before going back to work. Doesn't hurt that: a) two days at the office are followed by a weekend so I can finish catching up on sleep; and b) the Senior Partners appear to be mostly screamed out after the past few months.

More as it happens.

Some days, the office environment is nice and collegial. Some days, it's like a war zone.

The problem is, I never know when someone in a position of power is going to explode, and how powerful the (not entirely metaphorical) shock wave will be.

Yesterday, one partner went on a rant loud enough that I had to pop out of the office to try to convince her to tone it down -- and, without my saying a single word, it worked. To an extent.

"I'm sorry. Just go, close your door," she said. And the volume did, eventually, decrease.

Then there was today, when another partner didn't so much go on a rant as blow up into a full-blown tantrum, screaming about ... I honestly couldn't say what she was screaming about, but it was punctuated by slamming noises that were either pounding a hand on a desktop surface, or stamping a foot in rage.

So loud the door couldn't hope to screen it out. So loud that earbuds couldn't screen it out. So loud and furious that it gave me the shakes, and I had a closed door between me and the tantrum.

It was almost - almost - enough to prompt me to step into her office, ask for a quiet word, and just tell her outright: "if I acted like that in this office, you'd throw me out the door. And you'd be right to do so."

Except that I'm not sure whether saying that would get me thrown out. And in this economy, I still need this job.

Some days, I wonder: is it me, or is it this place, or is it just a few people? I know I'm a bit of an edge case; I can't stay in a loud bar for more than half an hour before the noise starts to overwhelm me, and I may have mentioned how shouting disagreements seem to be the rule rather than the exception in this corner of the world.

But can it really be that what I'm observing is actually within the norms of civilized behavior here, and I'm suffering from some sort of delayed culture shock or cultural blindness, that it's only because of the norms where I was born and raised that I can't abide that sort of behavior?

Well, whatever's normal here, here's where I am, and here's the civilization I've got to endure.

I fly back Stateside two weeks from today.

Damn, it'll feel good to be home.

The big news here in Greece recently has involved a borderline-insane radical fringe party that saw an upswing in popularity, overestimated the leeway it gave them to play fast and loose with the accepted norms of society, and are currently in several flavors of deep trouble.

Sounds weird and foreign, doesn't it?

When your sarcasm detectors have stopped beeping, you might be a bit surprised to know that the last big protest in Athens was actually a multilateral show of opposition to the clowns in the Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) party, who have fomented an atmosphere of anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner violence, appropriated a lot of the imagery of the Nazis (who, if you'll pardon a historical detour, actually invaded and occupied this country within the living memory of a lot of people living here, and did a lot of the same sort of stuff that got their higher-ups hanged at Nuremberg - check that, some of the stuff they did here in Greece actually did get 'em hanged at Nuremberg), and ... where was I? Oh yeah, anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner, anti-people-who-don't-like-Golden-Dawn. That last category's there because it includes a popular Greek rapper who got stabbed to death on the streets of Athens by a vocal Golden Dawn supporter, which proved to be a bridge too far for the sane caucus of the Greek Parliament, which these days can't seem to come to substantial agreement on anything.

When I say that the behavior of Congress in Washington is baffling to my co-workers here in Athens, you've got to understand this is coming from people who are intimately familiar with dysfunctional legislative organizations. And like it or not, stuff that goes down in Washington is news in Athens; the shutdown was on the front page of at least one major paper here.

On a more personal note, things have actually quieted down to a great degree. Like I said, the last screaming protest to hit my neighborhood was intended to tell the Golden Dawn crazies to put a sock in it; there are general strikes on tap for November, but I don't know how much impact they're going to have. In the office, there was a shuffling around of desks and such to accommodate new hires (oh yeah, we've got new hires, so things aren't all bad), so I got shunted to one side. To an office of my own.

With a window (albeit on an airshaft, but still).

And a door.

A solid door.

Most of the time, I leave it open, so as not to isolate myself, but there are still times when people get loud enough to cross the obnoxiousness threshold (about 90 dB on the iPod's sound meter), and I can close the door to give myself a bit of noise buffer. It makes life a little more livable.

All's quiet on the home front, too. Had a series of little incidents last month - my washing machine kind of exploded when I threw a bath mat into it to wash, not realizing that whatever non-grip stuff it had on its bottom surface would slough off and completely clog the works. So I had to get a replacement. And it wasn't properly installed - more to the point, there was a piece locking the shock-absorbers of the clothing drum in place, that was supposed to be removed before operation but wasn't, so when I ran it, all the vibrations were transmitted to the full machine, which would kind of dance. Until the time I started a wash cycle and the thing vibrated about half a foot to the right and completely blocked the bathroom door. Which led to the window on the bathroom door being broken out to allow passage in to shove the washing machine back into position.

It's fixed now. The washing machine, that is. The door window still needs replacement.

And somehow it's already almost time to plan my Christmas/New Year's trip to New York to see the family. Have to see how that works out.

PS: as the native English language speaker on staff, sometimes it's a little frustrating when I'm dealing with areas where the rules are fuzzy, or depend on where the speaker comes from or lives. Ah well. It's a living, I suppose.

Had to take a day off due to flu-like symptoms. Back to work today, but still not 100%. Thankfully, the in-box was clear before I got sick, and today was quiet.

Work-wise, it was quiet. Psychodynamics was a little different.

Question for the world at large: is there any profession, anywhere, where raking a subordinate over the coals, in full earshot of the entire workplace (when the superior has a private office with a door that can be closed) is acceptable behavior?

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.

Must be Murphy's Law at work.

I agree to do the editing job for the law journal in my spare time, and promptly get hit with a pile of work from the office that basically assures that I won't have any spare time to do that job.

Thursday night, while I'm struggling to finish a "need this now now now" translation, I get hit with another one from one of the Senior Partners: two legal decisions, total of thirty pages, from photocopies bordering on the utterly illegible in places.

"How soon is this needed?" I ask.

"As soon as possible," is the answer. Which is not at all helpful. If I've got conflicting tasks coming in, I need something to figure out how to prioritize them, and "as soon as possible" is worthless in that regard.

I take one look at them and announce, "There's no way this will be done by the end of tomorrow."

"Can it be done by Tuesday?"

Thirty pages. Between close-of-business Thursday and close-of-business Tuesday. And that other priority task is still not complete when the question is asked, mind.

"I'll have to see," I answer. "If I take this with me--"

"You're going somewhere?"

"No, but I'll have to work on this over the weekend, I can already see."

Fast-forward to Monday, after a weekend beating my head against the first (and the more illegible, natch) of the court documents. On page three (it's slow going), I hit a point where something is utterly illegible, and the only thing I can do is ask the Senior Partner who gave me the documents (and who's just finished yelling at a secretary over some percieved incompetence over procuring a ticket for a boat or an airplane or something) whether she can figure out the illegible bit based on better knowledge of the matter in question.

So I politely knock on the doorframe (this is also the Senior Partner who doesn't seem to understand the concept of closing one's door when yelling at people).

"Hi, I've got a question about this translation."

"Is it almost done?"

Monday (minus) Thursday (plus) thirty pages (plus) illegible (plus) senior partner (plus) hair-trigger temper (minus) grasp of reality = oh crap this is gonna be a bad couple of weeks.

Got asked for my input on a firmly worded letter a colleague wanted to send to an adversarial party that had demanded something stupid.

Futzed around to come up with some way of getting the point across in English.

Was asked to re-work it. Reason?

It wasn't sarcastic enough.

And people wonder why this country is going to pot.

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.