How do they do it?

I am told that translators working in Europe often have to wait for inordinately long periods to get paid, and I've proof it's no exaggeration.

I've had an interesting history with a French agency I've done some work for.

The first job I did for them was a rush, wherein we agreed on the rate, but not the terms of payment. My bad. Theirs, too, except that when I sent an invoice with my standard "30 days net" terms, I was told the agency paid "60 jours fin de mois," which basically translates as: "payment 60 days after the end of the invoicing month," effectively 60 to 90 days, depending on when during the month the work was done.

Or so I thought.

Silly me.

I hadn't reckoned on the agency's decision to cut checks in the middle of the month (for which there is actually a refined formulation in French, such as: "60 jours fin de mois le 15," which means: we pay on the 15th of the month starting 60 days after the end of the invoicing month, i.e., up to 105 days after the work is submitted.

Here's their payment history:

Invoiced	Paid	Aging
2/8/2007	5/14/2007	96
2/12/2007	5/14/2007	92
2/20/2007	5/14/2007	84
2/23/2007	5/14/2007	81
3/13/2007		198
3/16/2007	7/3/2007	107
4/4/2007	7/3/2007	89
7/5/2007		86

What's funny is that the agency's rating at proz.com pretty much uniformly shows it to pay "on time." (Perhaps my standards are too high?)

Here's hoping I get paid by Halloween!

Cheers...

UPDATE: Three Four more emails have gone out the wire inquiring about payments, or to be more precise, the lack thereof. Grrr.

Taking the hurdles...

I got hold of Natalie to ask if she'd mind going up to New York with me for the funeral. She agreed. When I started pricing tickets where the departure date was tomorrow or the next day, it quickly became apparent that two round trips would cost a pretty penny, even on JetBlue. So I started to consider the road trip option again, with Natalie flying back this weeked, leaving me free to drive back to Houston or out to Colorado.

I had spent the morning on finances because payment dates loom with the urgency of a burst appendix and the closing that was to have occurred today now probably won't happen for a couple more weeks. With the news of my father's death, all of the urgency sort of got squared and cubed, because there are some death-related expenses that I'll have to cover in the very near future.

I called my former employer - the woman, not the company - and asked her to float me a combination of an advance on my invoices to the company and a personal loan, and she not only agreed, but she had one of the company's drivers deliver the check to my house. At least now there's that many fewer things to worry about.

At Natalie's request, I drove up to Hare Repair to have the Focus looked at before we undertake the long road north. They changed the oil, examined the car, and pronounced it fit, except for the nail that I'd picked up in the left rear tire, and suggested I go to a place like Discount Tire, which runs a store a bit down the road, as they don't work on tires at Hare. As before, the bill was reasonable. Discount Tire outdid that; they removed the nail and patched the tire at no cost.

* * *I am a bit taken aback about how emotional I've been today about my dad's death. I have probably shed more tears (and fought some others back) than I did for my mother. Perhaps it was the sudden nature of his departure, or the fact that I had over a year to prepare for my mom's passing, or some combination.

For the longest time, I resented the man. He was not my father, because my father had died before I reached my first decade. My father had been a newspaperman, which somehow seemed more... something - manly? - than being a draftsman. My memories of my biological father were only positive, because - I came to realize as I grew older - I'd never seen him drunk. I cried and cried when he died. In fact, part of me never really believed that he was dead, that maybe he was on some kind of secret mission for the government that required the world to think he was dead.

Yeah, I know that sounds nuts, but those were the kinds of thoughts that crossed my mind as a kid, and the nagging suspicion that - pehaps - my biological father was alive persisted into my twenties.

For his part, Len - and I always called him Len, never "dad" or anything like that, until I couldn't call him anything else - didn't really seem to tremendously interested in me. He seemed to benignly tolerate me, except for when I crossed him, whereupon his reaction typically was to not speak with me. He seemed to instinctively know that I could be motivated by the silent treatment. That, and telling me I wasn't capable of achieving certain goals, like mastering Russian.

Since the age of about five onward, I believe he hit me twice. The first time, I richly deserved it; the second... well, I could see his point of view. If there was a third time, I don't recall it clearly.

He never lectured me about how to live my life, except by his example. Still, it would appear I turned out reasonably okay in spite of everything, and despite an utter lack of the kind of relationship that probably only existed on My Three Sons. My old man was no Fred MacMurray.

I need to snap back to reality if I'm to have a prayer of getting on the road tomorrow. Thank you to all of you who left comments to my previous post; they mean a lot to me, and forgive me for not responding to them individually.

Cheers...