Thursday, January 26, 2017

Not Merry X Nor Easy Breezy: Kicking January

Woodstock Not My Day

Since the month is about to

come to an end

decided to blog about it earlier

 

before my blog is transformed

into a blog solely exist

for the purpose of disseminating

the craze for Wang Kai

 

the month started off real bad

lost at least 6 hours of work

simply because I accidentally

pressed the power button

 

so my PC got rebooted

without saving the file before hand

there wasn’t auto-save function

more importantly the deadline

was within 1 hour

All Gone X Accidentally: Starting Silly

 

the month continued to

get darker and darker

having received a few feedbacks

on minor yet fatal errors

in my work

 

like even myself

can’t forgive myself

for making such errors

not to mention my project managers

and the clients whom they

have to be directly facing

 

since then

i had a rather quiet week

which pointed in two directions

it’s time to take a break

since I had been busy

since late December

 

on the other hand

it felt scary

like I have been fired already

banned from being enlisted

for any future project

 

then it got slightly better

as I got job flow

on constant basis again

 

and i actually rejected

a few large volume tasks

although these tasks could have

significantly bring up my sales figure

 

because

i don’t want to take the risk of

taking large volume tasks for

contents I am not familiar with

 

as well as getting myself stressed out

during the festive season

where I got tons of

other household matters to deal with

 

I guess the worst

has already passed

 

few days back

i got a translation request

for a minor task of 170 words

 

once confirmed,

was waiting for the file to come in

as I wanted to get it done ASAP

 

to realize that

there were two files in the folder

one with 170 words and

another one with bigger volume

at least 2000 I think

 

so I screen captured it

asking for double confirmation

for the large file as

it was not previously mentioned

 

and I got confirmation

to proceed and deliver the file

by end of the day

 

so I spent another 3 hours

working on the file

and delivered it

 

next day

when the purchase order came in

only 170 words were billed for

 

that can’t be true

the manager had probably missed out

when I sent out a reminder’s email

 

the reply got me shock

when the manager told me that

 

it was a duplicated file that

i have worked on

and (s)he only realized it

 

when the other translator

sent the same file

 

it got me quite frustrated because

in the first place

i did ask for confirmation if

i should proceed with the file

 

and the reply was something like

yes.. 170 words cover both files

as I have worked on a duplicated file

 

and i assumed the matter

will be skipped all together

if I didn’t send the reminder’s email?

 

there was ample time

to send me an email explaining

and i probably would have said it’s okay

 

this sounded like

a case study for a public relation crisis

 

- you didn’t stand out and explain

and it’ll make thing worse

when the other stakeholder finds out

 

- the explanation/apology

(promise to solve = no solution)

provided was up to no good

 

- your stakeholder had

taken extra step which could have

prevented the whole thing

in the first place

 

anyway

i choose to accept the

no-solution’s solution as

there’s nothing I can do anyway

 

and i would still like to

seek for long term collaboration

from the same company

 

this person is rather new

in the position

like less than 3 months?

wouldn’t want to do the harm

 

so this is how i kicked started

the Lunar New Year break

 

i guess i have been

heavily brainwashed by

those festive advertisements

on forgiving and harmony

 

and i actually

didn’t tell a single person

except you regarding this

although I was quite mad

in the first place

 

the scare for job security

was real though

 

at the same time

i have spent tons of money

since the year started on

- festive groceries

- apparels for the family

- 3 sets of flight tickets

- Red packets for parents (soon!)

 

which didn’t really tally

with the sudden plunge in income

and I would be travelling

for the 1/3 of February

 

finally got to know the feeling

of a particularly familiar scene in series

pretending to go work whereby

one has already got fired from work

or lost the job

 

i thought it looked ridiculous

but now it isn’t