Random thoughts...

On Friday, I received an emailed offer to do some translation work for tomorrow morning, almost 3,000 source words in size. In my reply, I asked if the deadline could be moved by one day, to Wednesday morning. Instead of saying no, the client responded a couple of hours later with news that they had placed the assignment elsewhere. In retrospect, I'm sort of glad I didn't land the assignment, because it was all I could do to finish the big job for this morning, which would've put a lot of after-hours pressure on me right now, but I digress...

Now, the fact of the matter is that I probably could have burnt the midnight oil and accomplished the assignment within the stated deadline, but unless you have a very good relationship with an agency, it's awkward to phrase your reply to say you don't really need an extension, but would like one anyway. (And never, ever, try to support your request with a reason, because it places you in super-supplicant mode, and frankly, agencies don't care.)

There's a lesson for new freelancers here: attempting to negotiate a deadline with an agency can kill an assignment. The only thing you can do that's worse is to accept the assignment and then, after it's too late to find anyone else, to force a change of deadline unilaterally.

And what if something really happens to cause you to miss the deadline? Well, in my experience, don't be surprised if you never hear from the agency again.

* * *I generally don't dwell on religious themes, but it occurred to me, as Galina and I were driving around and ended up behind a car with a "What Would Jesus Do?" bumper sticker on it, that the answer to that question, in keeping with the Gospels, would be more than likely "Something you would least expect!" as opposed to an answer that, at its base, betrays a prideful attitude that purports to know of the mind of God.

* * *I have been tentatively offered an opportunity to do one more launch campaign in Kazakhstan. This is something I'm going to have to seriously sleep on, because there's a part of me that doesn't want to be separated from home for 6 weeks, and another part that looks at 6 weeks of steady, paying work as a Real Good Thing™.

* * *Natalie and I got to discussing the idea of "prestige" associated with various professions. Back when I was a kid, the clergy, doctors, lawyers, and professional people in general were held in fairly high regard, and one could say that there was prestige associated with such lines of work. The same could be said for educators, to one degree or another. (For the purposes of this discussion, the utility, virtue, and other aspects of prestige are not considered in this freewheel.)

Today, though, with some rare exceptions, we've relegated the clergy to the role of pedophiles, doctors to the role of mechanics in the pay of drug companies, lawyers to the role of ambulance-chasers, professors as institutional parasites, and on and on and on. The only groups to have retained a certain social cachet seem to be celebrities in the fields of entertainment and sports (although when you consider the rash of overdosing entertainers, steroid-enhanced athletes, and so on, even this kind of prestige seems to be experiencing severe erosion).

Astronauts might qualify as candidates for "prestigious job," but only with difficulty, because few people I know outside the business can name anyone other than Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn. Moreover, between fictionalized portrayals of astronauts as somewhat idiosyncratic individuals (Northern Exposure, Terms of Endearment) and the hullaballoo last year with Lisa Nowak... you get the picture.

We seem to live in a world that is intent on having no heroes, not even (for the most part) in our fictionalized stories, and that's a shame.

* * *The meeting I'm working went well today, although the other interpreter had a scheduling conflict with his annual NASA physical this morning. Tomorrow's time will be split among various training facilities, which is no guarantee that it won't be a hard day of work.

Cheers...