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Burning out...
Oct. 11th, 2002 09:58 pmA long time ago, I came close to burning out on the job. It was not a pleasant feeling.
Then again, it's hard to say how close I was, or if I crossed the threshold, or if I stopped far short of it.
It was during my time at Borland, as a matter of fact. I don't think I ever worked as hard at a job, or for so long, or for so many hours. Everyone in the company had an MCI Mail account - this being the days before the ubiquitous Internet - and there were easily a couple of hundred e-mails a day that had to be dealt with. Then there were meetings... so many that I used to wonder how anyone got any work done. In my case, it was after hours and on the weekends.
It was that feeling of exhaustion, mild depression, a healthy portion of bone-tiredness, and a pinch of hopelessnes (as in not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel) that did me in. My work, no doubt, reflected my inner condition, and in the end, my value to the company fell below what it was worth to keep me around.
That feeling was also why I elected to move to Colorado, despite a promising interview in Redmond with Microsoft.
I write this because I am starting to feel that way again, and while the psyche is tougher now than it was a decade ago, the flesh is somewhat older.
I can see it in my translation work. Normally, I can turn out 4,000 words per day pretty consistently. Lately, the output has dropped. Doing El Humungo, I was lucky to translate 2,500 words a day, on a sustained basis. And this current project for client T, which should have taken me three days, maximum, is taking me much, much longer.
Part of it may be attributed to the paper chase, but the fact of the matter is that after the big surge of effort I wrote about a while back, I haven't spent much time at all in the room. I'm sleeping bady. Eating poorly. Renewing old bad habits.
Why am I writing all this?
I guess it's to say that when push comes to shove, I'm not going to let the situation grind me down. (Illegitimi non carborundum!)
* * * Upgrading my cell phone was part of my campaign to take back my mind, so to speak. It was an example of doing something constructive that needs doing (and which strokes the kid that lies dormant in all of us).
But you have to do more, so today, I sat down and took some control back. I invoiced El Humungo (a task long overdue... sort of like giving client M a 10-day, interest-free loan of a significant chunk of dough). I also called the insurance company to find out what happened to the check for Lee's car, which she totaled some months back. We'd gone back and forth for a while on the title, which I thought I'd taken care of, but I'd allowed the issue to slip into a crack during all the hubbub surrounding El Humungo, et alia.
To be sure, I am within striking distance of the end of the assignment for client T. The text is not particularly hard, but I'm finding that TRADOS is not such a hot tool for translating repetitive tables (e.g., ones where the entries in one column are limited to two or three different values). It also has a problem with rendering Cyrillic in the translations it offers, forcing you to retype them and thus killing much of the utility of using the program to begin with.
(Lots of the material done for NASA renders the Cyrillic abbreviations in the original Russian documents as Cyrillic in the English translations. Heck, people - and particularly astronauts - have been working with the Russian technologies for nearly a decade, and it turns out to be easier to deal with one set of abbreviations than two, but I digress...)
Taking another tack to whittle away my tiredness, Galina and I watched a recent Netflix arrival, an Argentinian film titled Nine Queens. None of the actors was familiar to me, though the face of one of the two main characters reminded me of Alan Rickman (who has played so many "heavy" roles in movies, perhaps the most memorable - for me - being the character of Hans Gruber, the terrorist ringleader in Die Hard).
In any event, this movie reminded me a lot of The Sting, except for what happens to whom. It's a gas to try to figure out who's trying to do whom in the movie, since there are so many, many different variations in which the plot can work out. (In fact, one crucial item didn't hit me until Galina and I did a brief post-mortem.) While I don't think I'd go out of my way to see this movie again, nor would I consider buying it for a permanent collection, I think it's definitely worth a viewing.
And on that note, I shall do a little more of the translation, or maybe not... and then go to sleep. Once the translation is done and gone, then it'll be crunch time on the paper chase, but I think, in the end, everything will work out.
Cheers...
Then again, it's hard to say how close I was, or if I crossed the threshold, or if I stopped far short of it.
It was during my time at Borland, as a matter of fact. I don't think I ever worked as hard at a job, or for so long, or for so many hours. Everyone in the company had an MCI Mail account - this being the days before the ubiquitous Internet - and there were easily a couple of hundred e-mails a day that had to be dealt with. Then there were meetings... so many that I used to wonder how anyone got any work done. In my case, it was after hours and on the weekends.
It was that feeling of exhaustion, mild depression, a healthy portion of bone-tiredness, and a pinch of hopelessnes (as in not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel) that did me in. My work, no doubt, reflected my inner condition, and in the end, my value to the company fell below what it was worth to keep me around.
That feeling was also why I elected to move to Colorado, despite a promising interview in Redmond with Microsoft.
I write this because I am starting to feel that way again, and while the psyche is tougher now than it was a decade ago, the flesh is somewhat older.
I can see it in my translation work. Normally, I can turn out 4,000 words per day pretty consistently. Lately, the output has dropped. Doing El Humungo, I was lucky to translate 2,500 words a day, on a sustained basis. And this current project for client T, which should have taken me three days, maximum, is taking me much, much longer.
Part of it may be attributed to the paper chase, but the fact of the matter is that after the big surge of effort I wrote about a while back, I haven't spent much time at all in the room. I'm sleeping bady. Eating poorly. Renewing old bad habits.
Why am I writing all this?
I guess it's to say that when push comes to shove, I'm not going to let the situation grind me down. (Illegitimi non carborundum!)
But you have to do more, so today, I sat down and took some control back. I invoiced El Humungo (a task long overdue... sort of like giving client M a 10-day, interest-free loan of a significant chunk of dough). I also called the insurance company to find out what happened to the check for Lee's car, which she totaled some months back. We'd gone back and forth for a while on the title, which I thought I'd taken care of, but I'd allowed the issue to slip into a crack during all the hubbub surrounding El Humungo, et alia.
To be sure, I am within striking distance of the end of the assignment for client T. The text is not particularly hard, but I'm finding that TRADOS is not such a hot tool for translating repetitive tables (e.g., ones where the entries in one column are limited to two or three different values). It also has a problem with rendering Cyrillic in the translations it offers, forcing you to retype them and thus killing much of the utility of using the program to begin with.
(Lots of the material done for NASA renders the Cyrillic abbreviations in the original Russian documents as Cyrillic in the English translations. Heck, people - and particularly astronauts - have been working with the Russian technologies for nearly a decade, and it turns out to be easier to deal with one set of abbreviations than two, but I digress...)
Taking another tack to whittle away my tiredness, Galina and I watched a recent Netflix arrival, an Argentinian film titled Nine Queens. None of the actors was familiar to me, though the face of one of the two main characters reminded me of Alan Rickman (who has played so many "heavy" roles in movies, perhaps the most memorable - for me - being the character of Hans Gruber, the terrorist ringleader in Die Hard).
In any event, this movie reminded me a lot of The Sting, except for what happens to whom. It's a gas to try to figure out who's trying to do whom in the movie, since there are so many, many different variations in which the plot can work out. (In fact, one crucial item didn't hit me until Galina and I did a brief post-mortem.) While I don't think I'd go out of my way to see this movie again, nor would I consider buying it for a permanent collection, I think it's definitely worth a viewing.
And on that note, I shall do a little more of the translation, or maybe not... and then go to sleep. Once the translation is done and gone, then it'll be crunch time on the paper chase, but I think, in the end, everything will work out.
Cheers...
