Just think about the problems you could have with English.

via …is a blog

One thing that really, really annoys me is when I start a DVD to watch a movie or a TV show and it is set up so that I have to endure trailers and announcements of other programs without being able to switch directly to the main menu. (I’m looking at you right now, BBC.) I haven’t spent good money to purchase DVDs of TV shows only to be held hostage and force-fed trailers and advertisements for other shows without the option of clicking away. This is an insult to paying customers! Next time, somebody show me how to use BitTorrent, please.

The gods of freelance translation are a vindictive bunch. When they catch you slacking off, it will come back to bite you. Unfortunately, my brief absence from the keyboard and from translation work at the end of the year did not go unnoticed and I had to pay for it when I came home:

• My TV didn’t work anymore. It could not detect any signal. In fact, my DVR had simply stopped recording the week before.
• The car would not start. As it turned out, during my absence the fuel pump had decided to pack it in.
• When I first started my computer, I caught a virus that McAfee totally did not notice. It screwed up my browser and my e-mail and played other nasty tricks. As could be expected, it took hours to research remedies and to fix the problem.
• The SnipURL that points to the resource page for my presentation from last October’s ATA conference had been disabled “due to spam.” So all the links I had disseminated electronically and in print did not work anymore.

Not what I expected to find upon my return.

But some of the problems could be fixed. Dish Network sent a technician within hours. He found a broken connector between dish and cable. Malwarebytes was able to identify 17 infected objects and after removal of those objects my computer is running ok again. I e-mailed the SnipURL editor asking that the link be reinstated; how could a link to a page with presentation resources be spam? It took them only two hours to fix the link. That leaves the car. I hope that it can be fixed by Monday or Tuesday.

I guess I’ll have to learn how to stay off the radar of the freelance translation gods.