I'm going to court!
Oct. 6th, 2006 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philenaWell, maybe. AT&T has sent us to collections, because we haven't paid the $120 we don't owe them. I've spoken to them on the phone a few times, and each time the agent said that our account showed a 0 balance, it was closed, and a correct invoice should be sent to us with the next billing cycle. All we got was a bill for $120, which we ignored, expecting the correct one to be sent the next month. Then we got a "You have not paid this bill. Please pay it now," which we ignored, thinking it was sent by the same silly computer that sent us the original bill. Then this month, instead of the correct bill, we got a notice saying that we've been sent to a collections agency because we're deadbeats. That silly computer is making our life very difficult! I called collections, and got our account sent to the "disputes department," which meant they would put a hold on the process and not say in my credit record that I'm a deadbeat, and they're supposed to call us back today after they've looked at AT&T's computer records. Let this be a warning to EVERYONE reading this (and I know I reach a fair population of the world with my lj): AT&T is a soulless, corporate entity that has inconvenienced me since JUNE.
In other news, I have a new phone number now. It's brand new, as I discovered this morning when I was awoken by a sales call. It is now on the do-not-call registry. Email and ye shall receive.
My internship has improved remarkably since I last griped. The boringboringboring project I was stuck on has been pushed to the side, and now I am translating! The delegates who just finished a business training program here have finished their evaluations, and my job is to help translate them into English and enter them into a database. The translation, as it turns out, is really easy, but it took me the better part of Monday to translate one single evaluation, which is an extreme case of a tendency that is really ridiculous. See, Russians can't write legibly. They just can't. It's something about their brain chemistry, because they make no distinction between a and o, they make no distinction between п, н, and и, sometimes not even between т and ж* and when they start throwing in шs it just gets ridiculous. The result is a handwritten paragraph that can look very beautiful and regular, but when you try to read it you realize that it's beautiful and regular because it's composed of nothing but a series of identical bumps. And then they abbreviate without even putting down a period, so here I'll be begging the dictionary to tell me if специализир is a noun, adjective, verb, and the dictionary insists it doesn't exist. Which it doesn't. The word turned out to be специализированный, which is a past passive participle, essentially an adjective. I don't have a scanner; otherwise I'd post some of the most egregious examples just to show you what I've been dealing with. At one point, after I came for the kajillianth time to Olga, who is my first level go-to person to help read the handwriting, she grabbed the evaluation from me, read the instructions at the top, and then stormed over to the poor, unsuspecting fellow who had organized the entire project of designing the evaluation forms, and roared at him that it was no wonder I couldn't read anything, because he hadn't said in the instructions to write legibly. I suspect that some of these delegates, (especially Danil) would have written that way anyway, but it's nice to have her on my side.
I suppose I should hasten to mention that, although I'm griping about handwriting, I'm really enjoying this project. It's interesting, it requires constant mental effort, which means that the day goes by much more quickly than when I'm looking at the clock every half hour, I get to use my Russian skills, and the results are genuinely interesting. I like seeing constant responses that staying with the home hosts was a great experience for the delegates. One fellow even responded, "Rapture!" ("Восторг!"), which reminded me of Gilbert and Sullivan.** I find it appropriate that, in response to the question about what problems impede progress in Russia, most delegates answer "corruption." The rapture guy, however, answered something like, "The stage of economic development, which entails problems for the population that are connected with the formation of their materialistic base. And corruption." Yeah. You can't really leave that out.
In the bakery our Cream Cheese Strawberry Pound Cake is going out of season, because strawberries have gone out of season. A few of them were unsold on Wednesday, and normally they'd be sampled out to the customers. But since we're not making any more, it's rather silly to have a tray of samples, which people will taste and then want to buy and then not be able to have, so Megan let me take it home. Hehe! Daniel and I had it for dessert last night. I love that cake!
*The letters look very similar in print, but in cursive they're closer to ж and m. That's still kind of a big difference, but not if you're determined to make Clara's life difficult.
**A temporal footnote, rather than contextual. There is a hummingbird buzzing outside my window. Those things are everywhere in the Bay area! I see them every day when I walk to work, I here them every day when I walk from the bus stop to the internship, and when I don't see them I constantly hear them. Like now.
In other news, I have a new phone number now. It's brand new, as I discovered this morning when I was awoken by a sales call. It is now on the do-not-call registry. Email and ye shall receive.
My internship has improved remarkably since I last griped. The boringboringboring project I was stuck on has been pushed to the side, and now I am translating! The delegates who just finished a business training program here have finished their evaluations, and my job is to help translate them into English and enter them into a database. The translation, as it turns out, is really easy, but it took me the better part of Monday to translate one single evaluation, which is an extreme case of a tendency that is really ridiculous. See, Russians can't write legibly. They just can't. It's something about their brain chemistry, because they make no distinction between a and o, they make no distinction between п, н, and и, sometimes not even between т and ж* and when they start throwing in шs it just gets ridiculous. The result is a handwritten paragraph that can look very beautiful and regular, but when you try to read it you realize that it's beautiful and regular because it's composed of nothing but a series of identical bumps. And then they abbreviate without even putting down a period, so here I'll be begging the dictionary to tell me if специализир is a noun, adjective, verb, and the dictionary insists it doesn't exist. Which it doesn't. The word turned out to be специализированный, which is a past passive participle, essentially an adjective. I don't have a scanner; otherwise I'd post some of the most egregious examples just to show you what I've been dealing with. At one point, after I came for the kajillianth time to Olga, who is my first level go-to person to help read the handwriting, she grabbed the evaluation from me, read the instructions at the top, and then stormed over to the poor, unsuspecting fellow who had organized the entire project of designing the evaluation forms, and roared at him that it was no wonder I couldn't read anything, because he hadn't said in the instructions to write legibly. I suspect that some of these delegates, (especially Danil) would have written that way anyway, but it's nice to have her on my side.
I suppose I should hasten to mention that, although I'm griping about handwriting, I'm really enjoying this project. It's interesting, it requires constant mental effort, which means that the day goes by much more quickly than when I'm looking at the clock every half hour, I get to use my Russian skills, and the results are genuinely interesting. I like seeing constant responses that staying with the home hosts was a great experience for the delegates. One fellow even responded, "Rapture!" ("Восторг!"), which reminded me of Gilbert and Sullivan.** I find it appropriate that, in response to the question about what problems impede progress in Russia, most delegates answer "corruption." The rapture guy, however, answered something like, "The stage of economic development, which entails problems for the population that are connected with the formation of their materialistic base. And corruption." Yeah. You can't really leave that out.
In the bakery our Cream Cheese Strawberry Pound Cake is going out of season, because strawberries have gone out of season. A few of them were unsold on Wednesday, and normally they'd be sampled out to the customers. But since we're not making any more, it's rather silly to have a tray of samples, which people will taste and then want to buy and then not be able to have, so Megan let me take it home. Hehe! Daniel and I had it for dessert last night. I love that cake!
*The letters look very similar in print, but in cursive they're closer to ж and m. That's still kind of a big difference, but not if you're determined to make Clara's life difficult.
**A temporal footnote, rather than contextual. There is a hummingbird buzzing outside my window. Those things are everywhere in the Bay area! I see them every day when I walk to work, I here them every day when I walk from the bus stop to the internship, and when I don't see them I constantly hear them. Like now.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-06 05:57 pm (UTC)Yay for improving internships! It sounds interesting, if not always intelligible. Also, whee cake! (By the way, I miss you! I was just thinking about our PotC trip and how much fun it would be for another night out like that.)
no subject
Date: 2006-10-07 04:58 pm (UTC)