Badges and giggles

September 10, 2004

I spent the last two days interpreting, which I wasn't looking forward to, as my last two interpreting jobs were very difficult and stressful, for different reasons. One of them I mention in this entry, it's the one with the highly technical presentation which I really struggled with. The other I haven't written about, partly because I didn't really want to revisit it, but basically, it was my first foray into community interpreting, far from the cold business world, and I found it emotionally draining. I'll write about it soon.

I was a bit intrigued by the behaviour of one of the participants: every time she looked at me or I tried to talk to her, she got very flushed and seemed to struggle to keep a straight face. I wasn't sure what was going on until the evening of the first day, in the restaurant where we all met, where she confessed over a glass of wine that when she met me, she glanced at my badge (which, annoyingly, said "Naked Translations") and read "Naked Translator". After that, she just got the giggles every time she looked at me. The day after, I asked for a badge with my name on it instead.