Anger at Speakers and Economics
Excuse me but I need to vent every way I can or I’ll strangle somebody! That’s because last evening dad sent me a recording of a guy’s speech to translate and transcribe, which speech lasted for 29 minutes and was basically nothing but a string of utterly infuriating platitudes about economic growth. Which would have been bad enough in itself, as the entire concept of economics and especially this drive for growth is a terribly infuriating subject, being an useless and ultimately harmful human invention which got us in the crapper we’re now in; and I’m not talking about the economic crisis but about the environmental and social crisis. Still, the real problem was the quality of the recording, which was really poor, with the added issues of a faint trace of the translation and the crowd’s murmur that could also be heard alongside the speaker.
So I kept trying to play with the sound settings in an attempt to make out as much as I possibly could, then trudged along for nearly five hours of actual work, not counting breaks, split between last night and today, and the result can be best described as Swiss cheese, as it was full of question marks where I completely failed to understand words or even entire sentences, plus possibly more assumptions and guesses than words that I’m sure I understood correctly… I’ll call it completely unusable, but it was the best I could do so he, the speaker, whoever requested this piece of work and anyone else involved are very much invited to choke on it!
Of course, when the best I can do is of such poor quality it also makes me feel even more inadequate than I usually do, which at the moment only adds to the anger because I’m set on being angry and find it quite easy to fuel it with these feelings as well. Better than taking it all out on myself as I usually do, I’ll say…
On that issue… Why do people organize such things? Why do they insist on having speeches? Do they like hearing themselves talk so much or do they simply enjoy putting all those who will then be required to transcribe their words, either on paper or on-line, to this crazy amount of pointless work? Because it would seem so much nicer and easier for everyone involved if they’d just post what they have to say on-line and let everyone who’s interested read at their leisure, and perhaps organize conferences through instant messaging, which, if properly done, would also result in much more orderly proceedings.
I seem to be drifting back to writing a lot of personal posts and negating anything I may have accomplished lately regarding the goal of writing significantly more serious non-personal posts than personal ones this year. But that’s how it always is I guess. If I’m not forced to write non-personal posts I often won’t, though at least I am quite a bit less embarrassed by those I do end up writing under such circumstances than by those I write because I have to, in order to stick to the rules I set for this blog, so there’s one positive aspect at least.
