BACK TO WORK

It is July 2022 and I have been officially retired 13 years!  And during the 5 or 6 years after retirement I continued to work, much less and always with great joy.  

I worked for an international organization with the benefits that it gave me, and in counterpart of course I lost my freedom of choice on when to take holidays, and for how long, but I had other fringe benefits that to me were valuable.  I was also very lucky that where I worked I had mostly very good colleagues and enjoyed most of my time there.  There were of course some people that were unbearable, disgusting, disagreeable, mean and outright horrid, but they were a very small number.  As interpreter, after retirement I had the chance of being able to work freelance as the independent colleagues that have chosen that mode of work.  Of course the number of days I worked was greatly reduced, as I was filling gaps or doing some minor assignments, but all that suited me fine.  

Later on, exactly on the year I turned 70 I had an operation that went well, but left me out of circulation for a while and then Covid 19 struck, which made me stop during almost 2 years.  During the second half of last year I worked again as interpreter and this year started slow, but all of a sudden in May I was called to work and it became almost a non stop situation, especially because for several big meetings I was asked to practically go back to my old job as Chief Interpreter with all the extra work that that implies.   

The real Chief Interpreter was absent for reasons that do not concern this story; suffice it to say that being unavailable her boss asked several freelancers and finally settle with me as the longest-serving chargée d’affaires. 

Among the things I did in that job, was to make the lists of assignments, I called them “sudokus”, where one has to pay attention that all language combinations are correct, that the number of sessions for each interpreter are not excessive, that all sessions are covered conveniently and that the meetings end on time.  If they start late, is their loss as any wasted time does waste interpretation time assigned. 

The sudokus are fun to make, but hard work, as mistakes are not allowed.  I always liked to do them, but that is not the case for all interpreters.  Already when I was a staff member there were some computer programs that did them, and although I never saw them, I was told the result was very good.  I remember having asked my bosses to get one for my organization but at the time they were penny-pinching and considered them very expensive.  They are still penny pinching, but I hope they will find the moneys to get one if they are as good as they say.  

Besides the sudokus one has to make sure all meetings are well manned – or womanned or whatever in the modern inclusive language that I do not master – yet.  All this meant that I had to arrive early and leave not as early as I wanted, to make sure all meetings were over and the program for the following session or day was in order and delivered to the interpreters.  

The long hours were strangely (?) tiring, I realized that what before was a normal day/week for me now had become a hard thing and when I got back home I was ready to collapse, almost.  To make all things worse, these last two weeks Europe as a whole has been on the grip of a heat wave that could be a heat tsunami, strong, big and long. The work place is air-conditioned but not so the outside world and that was hard.

It is not the same the three musketeers (in their youth) than 13 years after their retirement, how true!!! 

Back to work also had a very pleasant side to it.  When I was the chief of course I had regular and sometimes frequent contacts with the interpreters that regularly worked in my organization.  As a matter of my policy, although I liked most of them, I tried not to become friends with them, as I thought that was the only way to keep a distance that allowed me to set the rules and make them follow them.  For me, that worked although of course that was not conducive to establish close friendships with my colleagues.

Once I retired I could have become friendlier with them, at least some, but it was a bit the situation of “when I want you do not and when you do, I don’t”.  Becoming friend with many of them was difficult and only worked in a very limited number of cases.  I remained in friendly terms with most of them, of course, but nothing more. 

Then this period of many meetings where I was in charge came and gave me the opportunity to see many of them again, in some instances I had not seen them for years or only crossed briefly during the breaks of meetings.  It was an unexpected pleasure to realize that many of them greeted me very well and for the most part did not have any problem in accepting me as chargée d’affaires.  This made my work so much easier because although there were long hours, I did not have to add the burdensome problem of dealing with problematic colleagues.  I am certain that their behaviour towards me helped in great part to the enjoyment I had during these weeks. 

Since the creation of the post of Chief Interpreter in my organization, which I was the first to hold, I have gone through three supervisors.  The first one was a Brit who was quite punctilious in the little details of the job, but at the same time did not know much about it, which offered me the opportunity to create the structure, establish the links with homologues in other organizations and to a certain extent, do what was necessary for the job to be done and the post to be anchored in the organizational structure. 

My second boss was also a Brit, but had been a translator before becoming the boss of the whole sector, so he did understand most of the things pertaining to my job, but he could not have done them himself.  He trusted me to do what was needed and for the most part left me alone to do it, with minimum interference and for him it was enough to know what was going on and that I was on it.  

When my retirement arrived, mandatory at 60 at the time, he was instrumental for making sure that my successor was in place BEFORE I really retired.  This was and still is a rarity, as it seems that HR lets go long time between someone leaving a post vacant and finding the replacement.  The reasons given are many and some more or less plausible or believable, but my job was the exception as David and I proved to the organization that without a chief interpreter nothing could be done properly and that only a professional interpreter could do the job. 

Now, going back to work almost continuously for some weeks, I had a third boss, this time not a Brit but he is an interpreter himself although he joined the organization translator and then climbed to be the head of the whole sector of translation and interpretation. 

So three different bosses for the interpretation section, one that did not know much but trusted me, other that knew a bit more and luckily also trusted me and the third that knows about the job and that maybe also trusts me but still wants to be around to make sure all is in order, maybe due to the absence of the real Chief Interpreter plus his personal interest in the running of the section. 

Sometimes his presence is not easy to handle as he wants to be everywhere, if possible issue instructions not always easy to integrate in the running of the meeting from the interpretation side, and also while playing the bridge between the administration in general and the sector of interpreters, sometimes he accepts things that should not be and offers services that cannot always be easily provided.  

Happily for me this is over, I finished my contract and now I am home writing this thoughts that may or may not interest my few readers and also enjoying the company of my dear cats Gordis and Peque and taking it easy.  

Thanks for reading until the end and a note to the powers that be, I am ready to go back to work, but in assignments of short duration.