Post office follies, and other diversions...

One of our boxholders came into the shop a couple of Saturdays ago to send off some money orders to a correspondent back East. To make sure the mail didn't go astray, said boxholder insured the envelope, a plain white #10 model.

Late last week, while Drew was off in Utah, said boxholder calls with a certain note of urgency in the voice, betraying the fact that the envelope had not gotten to its destination. I tell her that distance notwithstanding, anything with a barcode (which has to be scanned) is going to add time to the process.

Yesterday, said boxholder calls the store and relates the following tale: After calling the downtown post office for several days, boxholder gets hold of someone there who traces the envelope - as yet undelivered - to somewhere in Ohio. Then, after picking up mail from our store, boxholder notices the envelope has actually been returned, with a note saying that plain #10 envelopes cannot be insured (they must be oversized or have some thickness, like a padded envelope).

This makes me look bad, and I explain that I was not aware of any such rule. (However, with the USPS, you can never tell, y'know?) Boxholder starts making noise along the lines of "since you screwed up, you should shoulder part or all of the cost of overnight delivery to the destination." I mumble something nondescript.

Just a few minutes ago, during a short break in editing, I hit the USPS web site and went to the "calculate postage" page. I indicate my mail piece is an ordinary envelope, weighing one ounce, and select ordinary mail. Guess what service is among those offered as an extra?

Yup! Insurance.

Drew has been informed. I remain at home to struggle with a translation that knows not the meaning of register.

Cheers...

n-dimensional insanity...

It's not every day I refuse work from a new customer willing to pay a premium, but I did so today. My eyeballs, which have been abused of late, had a strong voice in the decision (you might say the "eyes" carried the vote, as I certainly wouldn't touch a pun like that with a ten-foot appendage, but I digress...) To make a long story short, the primary reason I nixed the job was the truly awful quality of the source material (and considering the unconscionable &#^$@! I've been dealing with lately, that's saying a mouthful!)

And it's not every day I take on multiple rush jobs, either.

Okay, so the edit from this morning was not a rush job, but still...

As my senses dulled (not a good sign for a translator or editor), my speed picked up, and I ended up spending a little over 6 hours editing 4000 words. The major problem with the translation was the fact that the "register" of the translation - from a document prepared by a government agency - sounded like a the result of a linguistic catastrophe involving J. Edgar Hoover and Cheech Marin, with frequent excursions into the land of mistranslation, as misguided attempts to sound conversational twisted the meaning of the original.

In the middle of it all, I got two hot potatoes tossed in my inbox. One was a PowerPoint file where about half of the 35 slides consisted of bitmaps with a lot of text in 'em (may the originator of the file be visited by a pestilence of parasites!). The instructions accompanying the file said to get really friendly with text boxes (the better to cover requisite sections of bitmap), which I did, and which will make counting words somewhat problematical, because PowerPoint was never good at counting words to begin with, but I again digress...

I was just so happy to put paid to that document!

I tried to nap after sending in the edit and the PPT file, but my $#!@&! cell phone kept ringing, and I was bereft of the common sense to turn it off, say, by chucking it into a toilet bowl. I probably did get a couple of winks, though, and thus refreshed, commenced down the Home Stretch™.

Drew came by around 7:30 to bring me a plate of lamb roast (delicious!), which I devoured on the verandah while fending off Misha (who's grown and wanted some lamb) and the attentions of my granddaughter (who is just plain cute). Among other news, I was informed that Shannon has quit her position at the hardware store and has resumed working at our store, with Drew.

And my gig at the jail? It's been rescheduled for tomorrow. I've been informed that no particular preparation will be necessary, which historically means I'll need to take a specialized dictionary or two with me, except I haven't the foggiest idea which ones, so I'll be playing it - as ever - by ear.

I've been promised another slug of French work. I can hardly contain myself.

Cheers...