Flubbed up a job.
Remember I talked about the jobs Fri. and Mon. (I actually had those reversed- Monday's job was today- the disability- which was easy and went fine, except I felt bad for the patient as I always do- so much pain.) Anyway the first job Fri. was a total disaster. I really sucked and it showed. I was so sick and Ricardo came with me just to observe and he ended up doing one of the four simultaneous interpretations. I had asked him if he wanted to since my voice was going downhill and hurting. Well apart from me the P&G person had asked him already. So he did the third person and was great. Well I did okay on persons one and four, but person 2 was difficult for me. I couldn't hear everything she said. I was losing my voice. In the end, the feedback I eventually got came down to I was horrible and totally wiped out. I had done work for this place before and they had asked for me again. But the P&G people were different people and I could tell that with one of them I was already kind of not really interacting well. I was socially inept and he was very anal. Some of these P&G people are way ridiculous.
Though nothing I messed up on could have impacted the study too much, in the long run I really have to address a problem I have, a problem I have been devising workarounds for my entire life. It may be due to whatever is in my brain that I described earlier, that may or may not be a sort of Asperger-like thing. Why it is that when I speak, read, and write a language perfectly, I have trouble processing content information. Unless I really train myself, I focus on the language itself and details and sounds instead of the actual content being delivered. This is a huge problem if one is an interpreter. Simultaneous interpreting is difficult. Now the consecutive interpreting seems to be no trouble. Talking TO a person and then talking TO another person. But to be listening to a conversation and repeating everything both people say, word for word, in another language, even though I've done it, I find it very difficult sometimes. I have to completely switch gears. Sometimes I just gird myself up by watching Univision and just listening to the content of whatever is on- news, soap opera, Hasta en Las Mejores Familias (when it was on- it's the Jerry Springer of Mexico- with even more ridiculous stuff thrown in- aliens in the audience, etc.), and especially comedy shows. When I get enough of TV and radio and hopefully speaking in an environment of complete Spanish for hours and hours if possible, it helps gear my mind to listen to content, not the sounds or the music or the pitch or the pronunciation or the mechanics whatsoever of a language. But this is where my difficulty lies. This is why I probably will not ever achieve 100% competency as an interpreter. I find myself doing the EXACT same thing when listening to other dialects IN ENGLISH. I am listening so much to the language (which is why I can repeat everything like an echo) that the message itself is lost. But it is not just repetition. I can formulate a lot of thought as well in English or Spanish. This is why I can speak Spanish with no English accent.
I see people who speak very little Spanish comprehend content without even comprehending how to speak it. That is how the majority of people are. I'm different. I'm totally the opposite. It is an obvious obstacle and possible learning/information processing disability that I am beginning to see is the root of most of my failures professionally and even personally. I am 40 years old and I finally see that I most likely have SOMETHING, maybe it IS Asperger's, that ties this whole thing together. So many things I couldn't do that everyone else could do are FINALLY making sense. I don't even know if I could call it Asperger's, though maybe as a child you could have. It's a little like Steve NOT having dyslexia any longer, though at times he sometimes gets things backwards if he doesn't think about it.
Hopefully I can continue training my brain to overcome as much of this as possible, which may or may not be easier now that I can pinpoint more precisely what this issue is. Is this why I hate talking on the telephone but enjoy writing a blog...?
Gerry obviously wanted to know WTF happened and he was pretty understanding even though at first it seemed like the fan was pretty busy slinging #$%* our way. Ricardo was there to kinda back up my story and the fact that the P&G people seemed more critical of the subjects than of us. But I may stay away from this kind of interpeting for a while until I figure out how to really, really overcome this. I think I would have been much better had I not been so sick, coughing, snorting, wheezing, etc.
The stuff I do at Rough, Pierre, clinics, and all those places seem to go so well. It's really because I'm interacting 1 on 1 and that somehow matters.
Sorry for this long epistle. It's more me writing to try to sort things out than a letter for anyone out there to read. If you have read this, congratulations on making it through my whinefest.
