(Please don't) Lock me in the bathroom

This is the first day that I have woken up early enough to eat breakfast when I wasn't scheduled to eat breakfast with someone else. It started my day off on a good note. Unfortunately, my cup of yogurt did not come with a bowl of patience, which would have been helpful.

Tuesday mornings are for translation or, more accurately, for proofing human or digital translations from Vietnamese into English. Unfortunately, the people I work with at this time do not speak very good English. This makes things complicated. In addition to our communication problems, it is hard to get things done because the person who gives me tasks either has no understanding of how long things take (e.g. proofing a 23 page document that was translated using an automatic translator -- and we all know how good those are) or just forgets that he's already given me several things to do, because he comes over every ten minutes to show me something or tell me to do something or introduce me to someone. Today, he brought over his doctor friend who wants to practice English and wanted to chat with me. It was hard not to laugh, because that conversation was like the blind leading the blind. I could understand the doctor's English perfectly clearly, but my supervisor felt the need to repeat/interpret everything he said, though his English is much worse. But perhaps his listening skills are better, because he also translated everything I said into Vietnamese for his doctor friend. After about five minutes of (unnecessary) translating and circling us with a video camera and urging us to talk, he left us alone to chat for another twenty minutes or so. After a few attempts I managed to feel out what his English level was, and tried to keep the conversation at a level that he was able to understand.

Later, the maintenance man came over to do some chain smoking and sprucing up. He hung a lacquer painting I received. He hung it about eleven feet high. He also hung a calendar and a clock that has an absurdly loud tick. Lastly, let me tell you about my bathroom. My bathroom room has a latch on the outside only. The enclosure with the toilet had a latch on the inside and as of today has a latch on the outside as well, but only the latter works. So, if I ever need to use the restroom while I have guests I'll have to do so with the doors open or I'll have to ask my guest to close my door for me and let me out when I'm done. Decisions decisions.

In the afternoon I had an English meeting that conflicted with my office hours. I felt like my office hours were more important for me to attend because students would be coming to practice their presentation for their speaking class tomorrow, but I was told that the faculty meeting was much more important. I was introduced yet again, and an evaluation of my first week was presented, so I guess it was important that I be present even if I couldn't understand anything except my name and whatever was whisper-translated to me. But I still felt like being around for the entire 90 minutes of my scheduled office hours would have been a better use of my time.

I made it to the last 30 minutes of my office hours, and had a very productive session with tomorrow's presenters. They actually spoke their presentation and seemed to understand the corrections I made. Last week's group wrote down my corrections but didn't implement any of them, so we will see about this group. But, working with them put me in a much better mood than I had been before they came. It made me even happier that working with students made my happier, since ultimately they're why I'm here.