Last-Minute Projects

As some of you know, I (in my spare time) work as part of a translation team. My specific job is localization (I don't speak enough of anything other than English to be otherwise useful to this sort of  team).

In short, I receive a file that has been translated into English, and it's my job to polish the English a bit. It's between five and eight pages, and generally doesn't need a huge amount of polish.

It's not generally hugely time-consuming, and it's work that I love doing.  Normally, I can get much of it done on my lunch break. This has allowed me to be very flexible with the revision work.

Currently, my day job is in a bit of chaos - someone is leaving and so we have a trainee.  Not only that, but the responsibilities of the person who is leaving are being split up among two other folks who need to make time to learn.

This means that the localization work needs to wait until evenings, because I need to get away from the office at lunch time, because it's very stressful.

On Monday, the translator with whom I work contacted me to let me know he had a rush job coming through. And it would be a big one. And it was due Wednesday morning. He was clearly frustrated at the time.

When I got up Tuesday, it was in my inbox. All thirty pages of it.

Tuesday night, I virtually ignored my houseguest to work on this project. And I was dissatisfied with the "finished" product, so I told the translator, who asked if we could work it on Wednesday evening.

We could - and did.  But it meant that I wasn't home until well after midnight.

The end result was a polished product (which is good) and an exhausted Eric (which is not good).

And, before you ask, I'd do it again if I had to. I like the people and the perks too much to give it up.

Short Posts From People Whose Writing I Enjoy

Yep. Not fun.

Falling Behind

When I first started this blog, I immediately had six months' worth of things I dislike ready to go. Because I dislike a lot of things (as you may have noticed).

As time went by, I have been mostly able to keep up. It's not hard to find more things I dislike.

But it's hard for me to find the time to write them up, and sometimes my mind goes blank when I sit down behind my keyboard, which leads to my panicking on Thursday evenings, trying to get something down before the post goes live on Friday.

I don't like that. At all.

While I can occasionally spit out a decent post in ten minutes, it feels ... wrong.

I like taking the time to craft these posts. Or playing games like scheduling a post about Late Posts for noon instead of 5:05 am. Or running a post about reruns for two weeks running.

Honestly, this blog is a lot of fun for me to write. Unless I put it off to the last minute. And then it's a chore.

So I guess it's really not falling behind that I dislike so much as not being ahead.

Either way, I'm not a fan.

Cash Discounts

My wife and I were a bit South of home the other day and we needed gas for the Beast. This is not unusual - the Beast may get very good mileage for an SUV, but it's still not fantastic mileage (22 MPG, for those of you who were wondering).  We only put Chevron in our car. It's a matter of "I have grown to trust Chevron's quality over the years, and have no desire to gamble with another brand at this point." Shell may be excellent gas. Arco could be phenomenal. But we use Chevron in our car.

The only Chevron station in town only had one price listed on their sign - $3.969 per gallon. Since it's $4.069 at home, we figured that would be a great deal, so we decided to fill up completely.

I swiped our card at the pump, pulled the nozzle off the pump and put it into the car, hit the start button and was about to start pumping when I saw that the pump was displaying a price of $4.069. So I looked at the sign out front, and saw - in small letters, "Cash/Chevron Card Price." 

That's right. Since I was using my Debit Card, I had to pay more. If I hadn't been paying attention, I would have been pretty angry. As it is, I still wasn't happy - that was borderline bait-and-switch.

Now I realize that accepting credit or debit cards costs the merchant money - generally it's a few percentage points off of every transaction, with a minimum cost per transaction. That minimum cost means that merchants sometimes lose money on transactions under about $10.

I understand and accept that.

What most merchants do is spread that cost out so everyone ends up paying a few pennies more per item - cash users give most merchants a bit more profit per transaction than credit/debit card users. I would wager that credit/debit card users spend more money overall, however (depending on the business, of course), which balances things out quite a bit.

To accept Visa or MasterCard or American Express or Discover or - really - any credit card, a merchant has to sign a merchant agreement with that credit card provider. One of the terms of that agreement is that the merchant cannot charge credit card customers more just because they are using credit cards.

To get around this, merchants occasionally offer cash discounts - that is, rather than charging card users more, they charge cash customers less. And by "merchants," I mean, "gas stations." Because no-one else seems to do this.

I don't carry cash. In fact, I have not regularly carried cash on my person since the late nineties. The rise of the Visa Debit Card meant that I could buy nearly anywhere without needing to worry about being robbed. On those rare occasions where cash was needed, I could easily hit a nearby ATM (those things are everywhere).

Not carrying cash, for me, makes me less likely to be robbed (and, if I am robbed, I'm not liable for purchases made with my card). Not carrying cash means I don't have to touch the stuff (it's really filthy stuff). It means that losing my wallet (something I used to do with alarming regularity) isn't as panic-inducing as it used to be.

I'd read about cash discounts years ago. They were generally considered a historical artifact.

Until now.

And I hate them.

How Robert J. Sawyer Ends His Stories

My wife is a huge fan of Robert J. Sawyer's writings. With good reason - he's an excellent author.

She has read nearly everything he has ever written. She's read at least one series more than four times.

Sawyer has very interesting ideas. His characterization is good. His setups are fascinating, and I like the flow of the stories he tells.

But he can't end his books to save his life.

How bad is it? Analog recently serialized one of his stories. I didn't tell my wife. Because I knew the ending would be thoroughly unsatisfying. And I was right.

One book started its epilogue (following an ending without any sort of resolution) by jumping forward 300 years. And moving the story from Earth to Mars.  You read that correctly - he couldn't figure out how to end the story within the frame of the story itself, so he had to jump time and space so that the book would have a decent ending, even if the story didn't.

My wife threw the book across the room.

She confronted him at NorWesCon.

I still can't mention the book to her, or she throws her hands in the air and gets a bit shrill.

This, by the way, is not mockery.  We all have our hot buttons and triggers.

My wife's just happens to be Sawyer's habit of not ending his books. And I have a hunch I'd have done the same in that situation.

I can't say as I blame her.