AAAAAARGH

THE BLOODY POWER IS BLOODY WELL OUT FOR NO EARTHLY REASON THAT ANYONE IS ABLE TO DETERMINE FOR FUCK'S SAKE IT IS 46 DEGREES AND NOT AT ALL WINDY OR ANYTHING THERE IS NO FUCKING EXCUSE AND FUCKING PEPCO I HAVE FUCKING HAD IT - I AM ABOUT TWO MINUTES FROM GOING DOWN THERE WITH A BIG OL' BALL PEEN HAMMER AND SMASHING SOME SHIT UP LIKE THAT LADY DID AT COMCAST A FEW YEARS AGO, WHO'S WITH ME?

Okay. Back to work, while my fucking battery holds out. You know I hit save the moment everything shutdown, yep.

[eta: Okay, the power is back on after 20 minutes. What I hate is that most people, I assume, would see the power go out in the middle of the day and think 'oh, that's inconvenient' and assume it would be back on within about twenty minutes - whereas here in Pepco-land we are so beaten down and broken that every time the lights so much as flicker we wonder how long it's going to be this time.]

ooh, this is fun.

Almost exactly a month ago, I began the task of translating a book about Extremely Obscure Dialects of a Very Obscure Language from French (only slightly obscure, and that only within my team) into English (so team members can consult it who don't read French). I did almost the entire introduction in one day, and finished it the next day and slapped it up on the workspace but didn't alert anyone to this; then I began the first chapter, and was hammering away at it, and then I got mono, and my work (as you might imagine) kind of dragged.

And it wasn't just a matter of translating the French, is the thing; in order to be a really useful translation, it wants to be a translation of the document and not just of the text. So it's taken a certain amount of effort to make sure that the tables look as similar as possible - the reader has to know which bit of the original she's looking at in translation, see? - and the page breaks are in the same place. And then I've converted the whole business to PDF, so all my hard page-break work doesn't get ruined when someone opens the thing on another computer where they don't have the same fonts or whatever, and uploaded it, and a bit ago I pointed my team to the intro and the complete first chapter (acknowledging that the translation was quite clunky - I mean, if I were a publishing house, I'd fling it back in my face, but I'm after getting the point across, not producing an item whose English is of the same academic standard as the original French), and hoping they didn't all say "Oh dear - this is what you've been spending your time on?!"

They didn't. In particular, my boss (who does read French, so I wouldn't think she'd even need it so much) was very enthusiastic; she actually said "OMG". :-)

I like when my skills turn out to be useful.