LJ down! [Backdated]
Jan. 15th, 2005 10:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpLiveJournal was down today (from my perspective here in Kazakhstan) due to a massive power failure, and since I had this entry ready to go, so to speak, by the end of the day, I've taken the liberty of backdating it.
Office work was nominal on the eve of the start of propellant loading. The status meeting went smoothly. A few into-Russian certificates came in and a sentence or two of mine survived the rewrite cycle. I had expected the полтинник to have become a ghost town by noon, which is when the ILS barbeque was scheduled to start, but the issue of allocating interpreters and bilingual office staff had cropped up with a vengeance, in light of a fairly aggressive schedule of town visits proposed by the French team.
The basic hurdle here was the Russian insistence that the agreement in place between the sides for launch campaigns states that an interpreter will physically accompany groups visiting Baikonur city. Now put that up against the fact that folks like to visit the Luna Club and stay until the place closes down at 2 am (which means a 3 am return to the hotel), and that there are other folks who want to go only to the market, and still others who want to do the market and "la Luna" (as we have begun to call it), and there simply aren't enough interpreters to go around.
Leaven this with the fact that there really are no "spare" interpreters/office staffers to begin with (indeed, one office staffer was recalled to Moscow suddenly a couple of days ago to support the customer, without a replacement having been furnished, so we are actually short-handed), and you end up with four highly paid technical experts from the launch services company huddled in front of a white board trying to figure out how to allocate interpretation and office staff to support R&R while keeping in mind the real reason we are here, i.e., to launch a communications satellite, requires support as well.
So I ended up going to town shortly after the barbeque with a small group of people. Everything went well, and although I could not find anyone selling exercise clothing, I did pick up some shampoo, as well as some interpreter-hand experience haggling for a fur hat. After the market, our little group visited the pizzeria again, which was not quite as good (in my opinion) the second time around.
Cheers...
Office work was nominal on the eve of the start of propellant loading. The status meeting went smoothly. A few into-Russian certificates came in and a sentence or two of mine survived the rewrite cycle. I had expected the полтинник to have become a ghost town by noon, which is when the ILS barbeque was scheduled to start, but the issue of allocating interpreters and bilingual office staff had cropped up with a vengeance, in light of a fairly aggressive schedule of town visits proposed by the French team.
The basic hurdle here was the Russian insistence that the agreement in place between the sides for launch campaigns states that an interpreter will physically accompany groups visiting Baikonur city. Now put that up against the fact that folks like to visit the Luna Club and stay until the place closes down at 2 am (which means a 3 am return to the hotel), and that there are other folks who want to go only to the market, and still others who want to do the market and "la Luna" (as we have begun to call it), and there simply aren't enough interpreters to go around.
Leaven this with the fact that there really are no "spare" interpreters/office staffers to begin with (indeed, one office staffer was recalled to Moscow suddenly a couple of days ago to support the customer, without a replacement having been furnished, so we are actually short-handed), and you end up with four highly paid technical experts from the launch services company huddled in front of a white board trying to figure out how to allocate interpretation and office staff to support R&R while keeping in mind the real reason we are here, i.e., to launch a communications satellite, requires support as well.
So I ended up going to town shortly after the barbeque with a small group of people. Everything went well, and although I could not find anyone selling exercise clothing, I did pick up some shampoo, as well as some interpreter-hand experience haggling for a fur hat. After the market, our little group visited the pizzeria again, which was not quite as good (in my opinion) the second time around.
Cheers...
