Made it!

For the most part, yesterday was one long blur of highway, punctuated by rest stops. I drove up our driveway at 11:45 pm local time.

I would have gotten home a bit sooner, except that I made a slight detour in the Dallas area to visit LJ friend rillifane. It's not often that my path takes me past online acquaintances, and it really wasn't that much of a detour at all. rillifane and I enjoyed some conversation over a cup of coffee, in a well-appointed sitting room under the kindly supervision of the feline residents of the house, and then I was on my way, back on the road. My visit was most enjoyable, all the more so when contrasted with the rest of the day's schedule.

I really must settle down and do something serious about the phones in my life. It turns out people can get hold of me using any number of telephone numbers; the question is deciding which one to try first! I do hereby resolve to change the greetings on my phones so as to vector people to the right phone and minimize confusion among potential clients.

Today I opened the store with Galina, whom I roused from sleep when I came in. (Actually, it was the dogs that roused pretty much everyone in the house, as Sasha and Ming went running back and forth like loonies, apparently jumping for joy at their reunion.) I'm home early so that I can do the UPS report and submit it Real Soon (by the end of the day, else it costs us money). Having said that, I think I'll go do the report, and then maybe post more details later.

Cheers...

Clinton dooms us all...

In a story titled "Clinton to dedicate life to redistributing world's wealth," the Australian newspaper The Age has reported that His Billness "said it would cost America $US2.5 billion ($A4.87 billion) to meet UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's request for an extra $US10 billion ($A19.47 billion) to fight AIDS and other infections diseases." Clinton attempted to put this figure in perspective by comparing it to "two-and-a-half months of the Afghan war," or "about one tenth of one per cent of the federal budget."

(I seem to recall that when anyone proposed cutting one of Clinton's favorite programs by even a fraction of such a sum during his presidency, the idea would routinely be attacked as an attempt to eviscerate vital government programs, but I digress... )

At any rate, the story in The Age later quotes Clinton as saying, "There are 40 million AIDS cases a day and if we don't do something about it, there will be 100 million AIDS cases a day."

Now, I suppose it would be out of place for the story to have noted that, at a rate of 40 million new cases a day, Earth's entire population would become infected within five months! But surely there's got to be at least one editor out there who doesn't suffer from terminal innumeracy?

Then again, one of the points made in Bernard Goldberg's recent book, Bias, (which I am about 100 pages into, currently) is that folks of the liberal persuasion can pretty much get a free ride when it comes to spouting statistics like that.

Cheers...

When you aren't looking...

The thing that makes the situation with my phones so acute is that there are a heck of a lot of people out there trying to get in touch with me.

One D.C.-area client has been promising work for several days, and I did get a 19-page fax from them a little while ago, but without any explanation of what the material represents. References? The actual assignment? According to the phone conversations I've had, they should be pages of the former, but they really look like pages of the latter.

Three or four outfits have called looking for my résumé. This is one of the potential "gotchas" of the profession, because in the overwhelming majority of cases, agencies are not obligated to actually give any work to the people whose résumés they used to win the job.

In fact, there is a disconcertingly, um, adequate number of agencies who have no intention of using the experienced and, generally, more expensive talent they enlisted (sometimes even asking people to do short "sample" translations) to convince the end client to award them the work. Once the job is in hand, some agencies will turn around and hire translators who do far poorer work, but at much more attractive - for the agency - prices.

Anyway, just as I was getting ready to put paid to the day, I get a 12-page article from my newest Houston client. By the time I call to discuss the job, the contact person has gone home (oh, that time difference!), but the owner answers the phone and we discuss deadlines, agreeing to talk again tomorrow morning.

Right after dinner, I did about a page and a half in fairly short order and am confident I can do the job within the original deadline (first thing Monday). We'll see what happens tomorrow morning with regard to my instinctive request for one more day, based on my initial assessment of the article (the subject matter is fine; it's the fine print on each page that makes me think it's a 6,000-7,500 word assignment).

Now to go off and check messages on my Houston phone, and then to craft something suitable for a greeting on its voice mail. (I'm still going to have to develop the habit of checking for messages on a regular basis, though.)

Cheers...