At work, I’ve been working on the same project since January. It’ll probably be the highest billed project of the year. For someone who’s still learning things, it’s been a bit of a challenge but a great teacher as I’ve had to dip my hand into a little of everything.
I’ll be the first to admit that the project could have gone smoother. I know I’m new to all of this but that doesn’t mean I’m dumb. The client, for whatever reasons, didn’t have things organized on their end. I had worked directly with one guy who had been tasked with keeping track of all the items that needed to be translated. He was a nice guy to talk to, though he talked a bit too much about non-business related things for my tastes. I prefer to not let myself get distracted or it’s a vicious cycle of not getting stuff done.
Anyway, through one of our conversations he explained why this was a larger project than we usually have. It’s because their product (which I’m convinced is a roller coaster but all the product sheets point towards natural gas refinery) is usually sold with all the literature in English. Well, a sales person made a blunder and promised the materials in Spanish. That’s where my company steps in. They needed everything they send to their customers translated in Spanish. The guy I was talking to reckoned that the salesperson should have been canned due to the amount of money the one sale cost the company. Rightly so.
Well, Thursday I submitted the last of the documents and came home to celebrate with a beer. The next morning, when I got into work I had an email waiting wondering if I knew where two small documents were. I had missed them and set out about getting them translated as quick as I could. An hour later, I get a call informing me that the guy who I’d been in contact with had been fired.
It really came as a shock.
He said he had been told that his place had been eliminated. He had gotten a nice severance to satisfy him. But everyone at my company couldn’t help but notice the coincidence. Less than twelve hours after his work on the project had been completed, he was sent packing. Maybe it was just a coincidence but it surely didn’t feel that way.