Tuesday 1 June 2010

Career options

I am currently spending my summer working at a translation company in Helsinki. It’s great because there’s free coffee and I always start work on cake day or something and the people there are REALLY nice and clever and they can translate anything in the whole history of the world (you guys can pay me more for the free advertising if you want).
But I can’t help thinking if I want to translate for the rest of my life.

Being a translator is a pretty okay profession, I think. I mean, sometimes I’m plagued with the idea that what I’m doing isn’t helping anyone. If I really wanted, I could probably try to justify that I do help people because if you’re foreign and you almost die (or actually die) here you might need medical documents translated from Finnish to English and then if I translate it I might hav
e helped you. But I don’t get to run around in a lab coat myself or inject stuff or shout stat.

Admittedly I could never be a doctor. Although I can face countless amounts of gore and blood with nothing but blind enthusiasm I am deathly afraid of the production of vomit. Vomit itself laying on the pavement or something is perfectly okay and I’m mostly like to react to it by inspecting it for interesting food remnants, but when it’s coming out of someone, holy shit, I have to escape. It’s a phobia of vomiting and it’s called emetophobia for those of you who feel I wasn’t using enough long words before. You’re welcome. Anyway, that pretty much cripples my chances of going into medicine.

So what else is cool? Space. No, not just space but spaceTIME. And the universe. No, seriously. I mean, think about it. Black holes and wormholes and also quantum fucking mechanics. That shit is weird. I know that you’re probably preparing to be really bored here but it’s actually impossible (actually, just extremely unlikely) because you see, black holes especially are fucking amazing. Even the very idea of one forming is a mindfuck. What kind of crap implodes in on itself? It’s like an epic win star. It’s so damn awesome that everything is attracted to it. Imagine what black holes could do for Yo Mama jokes. Yo Mama so fat she formed her own event horizon. What the hell do you say to that? NOTHING. If people who tell Yo mama jokes shared an interest in large-structure cosmology they would own other people more. And if you don’t like the standard model then you could always root for string theory which is all ”I herd u liek tiny vibrating strings so we filled all everything with tiny vibrating strings so you can oscillate while you vibrate”. String theory is the shit. Sometimes people call it M-theory which makes it sound really cool and no-one knows exactly what the M stands for. It's like how swine flu got really scary when they started calling it H1N1. Except that we know that H1N1 means swine flu. Man, I would love a job in science. A job with a lab coat.

It’s a shame I can’t count, really.

I’m not even exaggerating. Counting from 1-30 is troublesome because I think what happens is I get BORED after like 15 and start thinking how fun it would be if I was on 26 already and then I can’t remember if I actually got to 26 or not and I lose count. Otherwise I can’t be bothered to follow through with arithmetic so my brain says ”meh” and then goes for a random sum that is probably kind of near to what I think the answer is. It seems that my superpowers rest with being able to type really fast and notice errors in texts. Occasionally I change stuff from one language to another. So here is my last ditch attempt to encourage people to employ me as a translator:

Okay future employers. Picture this. You’ve written a long contract regarding a million euro contract with Important Government Ministry. You can’t mess with those guys, they are from the government. You have to be serious. Imagine, then, that your document has typos in it. Not just typos like contarct or invioce but that your employees work prat-time. Or that you want your company’s staff to be the new faeces of the Important Government Ministry project. Imagine the burning embarassment, the unyielding desire for a chasm to conveniently open up nearby and swallow you. You wouldn’t want that now, would you?

Hire me!

I do that shit all day long! And you’ll never get an innuendo-based typo because they amuse me and I find them straight away. I am a valuable asset to your company! In fact, you can get rid of your workforce healthcare because without me you would just look for chasms all day and no-one would care.

E-mail me if you want a copy of my CV.

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