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.
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