Lone-Lee...
Aug. 10th, 2001 03:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpDespite an assurance to the contrary, Lee did not come home last night. I wish I could say I was surprised, but the truth is, I'm not. I love the girl tremendously, but she does have a serious problem that involves making commitments and then not keeping them. I don't know if I suffered from this when I was her age; I like to think not. She called earlier and seemed happy to hear I didn't have to go in to work until 9:00 pm tonight, saying that would give us a couple of hours to chat.
We'll see.
Got a call from a west-coast client, who had an emergency translation on his hands. At the time, I was in several miles away, having just completed a meal at one of the several Indian restaurants that dot the landscape here, so it was no problem to come home and pick up his e-mail and the attached file.
Technology is great. The time was you typically got an assignment via fax, and the quality of the received text often made you wonder why anyone would go to the trouble of faxing images that had degraded so much in repeated handling that they began to resemble gray splotches.
Now, among other wonders, documents are transmitted in PDF format, which affords a purity and crispness that, just a few years ago, your typical translator would have killed for.
So I open this PDF file and see... a scanned image that looks as if someone had made a copy of a copy of a copy of an original, dipped an arthritic chicken's feet in ink and allowed the animal to walk on the result, faxed the end product back and forth to some buddies a half-dozen times or so over noisy phone lines, and then shoved this final masterpiece inside of a PDF file. Ye gods.
My poor, poor eyeballs. At any rate, the translation is on its way back to the client; I think I'll hold off on the invoice until later.
In any event, the only upshot to having sore eyes right now is that it will probably be easier to go take a nap, if I can. I could not sleep past 9 am this morning, and unless I get some winks now, tonight is going to be one unpleasant shift, fatigue-wise.
Cheers...
We'll see.
Got a call from a west-coast client, who had an emergency translation on his hands. At the time, I was in several miles away, having just completed a meal at one of the several Indian restaurants that dot the landscape here, so it was no problem to come home and pick up his e-mail and the attached file.
Technology is great. The time was you typically got an assignment via fax, and the quality of the received text often made you wonder why anyone would go to the trouble of faxing images that had degraded so much in repeated handling that they began to resemble gray splotches.
Now, among other wonders, documents are transmitted in PDF format, which affords a purity and crispness that, just a few years ago, your typical translator would have killed for.
So I open this PDF file and see... a scanned image that looks as if someone had made a copy of a copy of a copy of an original, dipped an arthritic chicken's feet in ink and allowed the animal to walk on the result, faxed the end product back and forth to some buddies a half-dozen times or so over noisy phone lines, and then shoved this final masterpiece inside of a PDF file. Ye gods.
My poor, poor eyeballs. At any rate, the translation is on its way back to the client; I think I'll hold off on the invoice until later.
In any event, the only upshot to having sore eyes right now is that it will probably be easier to go take a nap, if I can. I could not sleep past 9 am this morning, and unless I get some winks now, tonight is going to be one unpleasant shift, fatigue-wise.
Cheers...
