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.

Customers Who Think That 5:00 PM Is A Good Arrival Time

My job is a full-time day job.  I work from eight until five, Monday through Friday, with an hour of lunch. We also have a policy against overtime - if you work it, they'll pay it, but it's better if you try to avoid having any in the first place.

I bitch about it a lot, but I really do like my job, because of the people. Most of the time.

When I leave at five, the office is closed.  The computers are shut down for the day, and we are done.

The warehouse guys usually start shutting the computers down a minute or two before five. On the order desk, we tell the computer to shut down at five, and then leave - we figure the computer can reboot or shut down without our babysitting it. And it prevents overtime.

Last Friday, a customer pulled into the parking lot at 4:58, and was in the will call office two minutes later.  The warehouse guys had already clocked out, but one of them clocked back in to help us take care of the customer.

Even better, he was a customer who is ... less-than-reliable at paying his bills and has an extremely thick accent, to boot. His accent is thick enough that I'm the only one in the office who can understand him most of the time. And he's behind enough that our system puts his orders on credit hold - we need someone in our Portland office to release them so that they can be pulled off the shelves by the warehouse team.

He'd placed an order earlier that day, but he places lots of orders, and only picks up a few of them. So we hadn't expected to see him.

When he pulled in at 5:00, I had to call the credit department to ask someone to wait.  One of the warehouse team volunteered to stay a bit late to help. And I got to do the talking.  And, finally, one of the keyholders had to stay here.

It took ten minutes to get the order released from hold (after he paid).  While we were waiting for the credit department, I got to sit through a long tirade about how he's been a good customer for twenty years and why are we treating him like this? It was hard to bite back the obvious response of, "because the money you're paying now is going to invoices from two and a half years ago ... "

Then I went out to help the warehouse guy pull stuff off the shelves.  It wasn't little stuff, either - it was almost a full pallet.  While we were pulling it, the customer backed up to one of our bay doors.

The product he'd ordered came in largeish boxes - roughly two feet tall, three feet wide, and two feet deep. This meant that the pallet-load of product wasn't going to fit into his minivan.

While we were pulling the product, I heard him on the phone to another distributor - apparently we were his first stop that night. And those other guys?  They close at 5:00, too.

Once his van was as full as we could make it, he told us, "I'll be back on Monday for the rest," and then he took off. At 5:30.

This means that my company paid a half hour of overtime for at least three people, not including the credit department people who hung out to assist. And all of us took a morale hit, because it was Friday at closing time.  Who wants to give up weekend?

Was the sale worth it? Financially?  Yes. Probably. But it cost morale. And it trained this customer that his behavior was acceptable, so he'll probably do it again.

And I really don't like that.

Breaking In A New Co-Worker

It's tough when you need to train someone new.

Mind you, it's better than being short-handed, but it still sucks. To start with, as the trainer, you are personally responsible for every mistake they make. Or, at least, that's how I feel.

Maybe it's why I do so much of the training.

I don't talk much about my job here. I complain about aspects of it from time to time, but I don't actually talk much about What I Do.  It's because my job is honestly pretty boring. I work on the order desk for a warehouse. It's part data entry, part receptionist, part customer service, part tech support, and it often feels like I'm someone's executive assistant all at the same time.

I'm responsible for every freight quote out of our warehouse. There are two other people on the desk, and one of them gave notice today.  Six weeks of notice, but notice nonetheless.

This means that we're now hunting for a new person.

Someone I'm going to train.

The job itself isn't all that difficult - but there are a lot of details, and you can very easily get tripped up on one of them. A large part of the training is teaching what to do when you screw up, because our corporate culture is unique.

My first week there (more than four years ago), I was shocked when one of the sales reps told me (in front of his customer no less), "I screwed up. It was my fault."  He didn't try to shift the blame onto me (as the new person) or anyone else on the desk. He had screwed up and accepted responsibility for it. And that's been (mostly) the pattern at the office. I don't know about our other location - I can only speak for the Seattle office on that one. But it takes some getting used to.

The first hurdle in training? It's not the job. We have zero privacy. We're not in cubicles - we're all on the same desk. There is no sound separation between us. Hurdle number two? I have been known to swear like a sailor. J, the co-worker who is leaving, also swears like a sailor.

Once we pass those hurdles, then we start with the basics. Order entry first, followed by the phones, and so on.

Training sucks. Its repetitive and includes a lot of "This is the mistake you made and here is how to avoid it in the future." And if I miss a step, then a mistake will be made down the road that will be my fault for not covering it in training.  There are enough details to stress over that several people have been here more than a year before a gap in their training was discovered.

And that's just the breaking-in for the desk. The new person will have to mesh with the warehouse and the sales reps and our management and the customers and ...

Getting used to the environment and the people is actually harder than the job itself. And it's rough on all of us for the first few weeks.

I'm not looking forward to it.