People have a frightful problem coping with the fact that I work on Saturday and Sunday. Some of them even have quite a challenging time remembering that those days are normal working days for me. On Friday (and sometimes Thursday) I quickly transmute into a Muslim or a Jew and have a day off. Many of my friends and acquaintances go into little appoplexies of horror over this, so let me explain. Yesterday was Sunday; a normal working day for me. I arrived at uni and got through about twenty abstracts in four hours, which is bloody good going, mostly because almost everyone I know (usually teachers - they are the usual suspects killing me softly with their work) were either asleep, updating their Facebook accounts, or doing whatever perverse, sick and probably illegal things teachers do on their days off. I also killed off a couple of e-mails, organised a couple of sets of information to get out to potential students, and cleaned up both my laptop and mobile. Only one student found the time and energy to come and visit me with the usual desperate and urgent need for editorial assistance (that is, in real life, translation). As I would expect from such an unusually organised student, she was both a pleasure and easy to help. This morning, Monday, I arrived at work to have three people throbbingly and hysterically hurl pieces of paper at me and my life, mostly foaming at the mouth and frothing about the loins in desperation to have this moon-shatteringly important language dealt with immediately, and if not, then six weeks ago, and you will need to organise that little wormhole backwards through time yourself because I am just so busy, so desperately, pulsatingly, pustulatingly busy. Meanwhile, I get the personal visit from a lecturer in my Faculty (and this is sickeningly normal) telling me that I have two e-mails waiting and that both of them are so important that any minute now a team of Russian Commandos, supported by the French Foreign Legion and Chinese terrorists, are likely to erupt out of the cracks on the tiles and start shooting biological agents from small rifles in desperate need to have this finished right now, and if not, then in a parallel universe ten minutes ago. Any second now I will get one of those paralytically hysterical phone calls reminding me about an e-mail that someone sent a message to me about requesting an SMS about an abstract title someone e-mailed someone else about over their i-phone to get translated somewhere in that tangle of media mess. NOW you know why I prefer to work on YOUR weekends!
Posted on: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 03:04:59 +0000
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