Friday, November 28, 2008

Big Week

Yet another interesting week in Doha. My colleague Mary flew back home today so I’m left steering the ship. It has been a week of lots of conversations. Lots of stuff to think about, truckloads of reflection with a close look at behaviour.
Work has been challenging and sometimes you just need to chill, take a deep breath and go with the flow. Had a couple of significant meetings Thursday. Big in the scheme of things. So while trying to juggle several other balls we were working towards these meetings. Part of this was the handouts. Simple…no because we are working in a bilingual culture here so everything that is developed needs to be translated, approved, printed. Now there is translation and there is translation. The best example of this I can give was when I was doing my study. The university tried to get every student to get this particular lecturer during the course of the diploma programme. I missed him Ahumdilahlah but Kay didn’t. So when she got her assignments back she would have three pages of notes. Half a page would be on the content of the assignment and the other 2 and half would be on the use of English… “where you have used the term data and are talking about a single item the term in datum”Now Kay’s English is pretty good so lets just say I was pleased to escape this opportunity. Well you tell by my writing that it isn’t that koser. Anyway back to the story. So the translation comes back, we print off the masters and get them checked by the boss who then gets an Arabic specialist check it. Not good enough more changes. I have during this time damaged two colour photo copiers trying to start the print run. It’s now a half hour after we would normally leave for home and there is this continual correction of the work. We spot a gap , get an agreement and do a dash with the masters. Having broken the copier we head into town. Mary has another meeting to go to so I’m left trying to negotiate with a copy shop owner the notion of priority and doing the job on the spot. I’m able to get this done. 1700 colour copies and $NZ2000 later I then spend my evening making up these packs in the print shop. Carry the now boxes and folders across the busiest road in the country to get a cab. Get to work the next day and when the boss introduces the first workshops states that (in Arabic) the handouts have a small error so please disregard the information ionthe pack and we’ll send out corrected versions via email. Roll on next week I say as it’s a biggie !!

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