Traffic was particularly bad that Monday morning but because I always leave very early for assignments, I managed to arrive about 40 minutes prior to the opening remarks. My boothmate hadn’t arrived yet so I sent him a text message to let him know I was already in the booth settling in.
A bit before nine a.m. the conference was about to start and not only had my boothmate not replied to my text but also didn’t bother calling to let me know what was going on.
He finally arrived 15 minutes late and I was already interpreting. Was I relieved to see him! He smelled like cigarettes, which I hate, but at least he was there. Talk about starting off on the wrong foot, huh? He started prepping himself on the booth in the noisiest way one can think of: opening the computer, bumping his head under the booth’s desk to plug in his power cord, accidentally kicking me, you name it! Not even his phone was silent. It actually beeped once or twice with incoming messages until he finally turned it to silent mode. I was doing my best to concentrate on the speech but he was making it really hard.
About 28 minutes into the presentation I was about to hand him the microphone when he stood up and left. What?! Really? I mean, did he really have to go to the restroom or whatever 2 minutes before it was his turn? I couldn’t believe it. Where the heck did this guy come from? Did he spend a week in Disneyland and came back calling himself an interpreter? I think I’m going to open a business to sell common sense and I’m pretty sure it’s going to sell out really fast.
32 minutes into the presentation and he finally comes back to the booth. Guess what? Smelling like smoke again. Yuck! He takes a seat and immediately starts asking for the microphone without having paid any attention to the presentation. I was so intoxicated by the smell in the booth that I just had to leave for a few seconds of fresh air outside. After my breathing went back to normal, I came back to the booth to offer him support while he was the one interpreting.
He was clearly unprepared and didn’t even seem to have a glossary. I think he was a little deaf too because he was almost shouting. I felt I was about to die from embarrassment for his lame delivery. His 30 minutes interpreting felt like absolute torture, almost as going down a slide of razors. The attendees were also clearly annoyed by his voice and lack of knowledge on the subject as they were looking towards the booth all the time and the event’s organizer came over to close our door a couple of times. I did try helping him out by writing a few words down for him but when you are that lost about a subject, single words can’t save you.
It was finally my turn again and the people in the audience seemed relieved. The nightmare was far from over, though. As I was interpreting, the Mickey Mouse* interpreter was slamming his fingers onto the keyboard making a lot of noise and seemingly oblivious to what I was doing. It’s like he turned his half brain completely off to the conference. I was trying to calm myself down by being thankful to the fact that it was a one-day assignment only. After all, every cloud has a silver lining, right? But this guy was just hopeless. I asked him to keep it down with the typing and not only did he look upset with my request but he let go of the computer and started opening the loudest, crispiest bag of chips ever. I must have been a really mean person in my last incarnation. I looked for the ‘eject’ button to get rid of him but today’s booths are lagging far behind NASA.
At a certain point, I took those extra 2 seconds we sometimes need to look up a word in our mental HD when he came out of the dead and just sputtered a word with an open microphone in the booth. And it wasn’t even the right word! “Do they have death sentence in Florida?” – were my exact thoughts as I was ready to chop him into small pieces and send them in a box back to the uncle who had paid for his trip to Disneyland.
The disappointments just kept on coming all day long: he suddenly closed my mic while I was in the middle of a sentence, he spoke on the phone outside the booth but in a really loud voice, he was really inappropriate during the breaks trying to bond with clients who weren’t his and the list goes on forever.
By the end of the day, I was physically, mentally and emotionally drained. I don’t know who hired this guy, but I’m pretty sure he is going to be benched for a lifetime. If the other day I worked with the Frank Sinatra of interpreters, this time I had the displeasure of working with the Jim Carey of interpreters. Not the “Truman Show” Jim Carey, he was more like his “Dumb and Dumber” version.
I tried telling him to take a real course in interpreting and to read some articles on booth manners. He got really worked up about it and couldn’t hide his arrogance. So I just let go of the whole thing. After all, there’s only so much you can do for those who don’t want to be helped, right?
*Mickey Mouse, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry if I offended you by comparing your sweet, smart self to this moron.
(For a list of other kinds of interpreters read A Hologram, a Peacock or Sinatra – What Kind of Interpreter Are You?)
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