I've had the same
little laptop for more that six years now. Everyone jokes with me
about it being a “dinosaur”. Well, maybe it is but it has
traveled all around the world with me. It has helped me study and
learn other languages, helped me talk to my family at home and it
even has every one of my travel pictures stored in a Zip file hidden
deep on the hard drive...which is the only upgrade I have lovingly
made on the machine. After all a five hundred megabyte drive isn't
much use now-a-days. Basically, it has been my companion and friend
for the last six years.
It was back in
2006. I had spent a year traveling around Europe when I met a young
fraulein named Edith in a small town south of Munich. It was love at
first sight so I took a job with an English language newspaper in
Munich. Now, German wasn't a language that I was strong in. I knew
enough to get along and maybe get my face slapped but that was about
all so I picked up a CD Rom that taught the German language in about
a month. Needless to say it did work and I went out feeling secure
that I could do interviews with Germans in their own language.
The thing was
about that program you had to install set of files on the computer
and they remained there even after you were done using the program.
My first article
was with a brewer down on Oberunger by the Marrianplatz. Actually,
the interview went very well. My German was strong and, since he
couldn't speak English I did the entire interview in
German...including writing his responses not in English but in
German.
The brewer told me
about his beers, his awards and lastly his new oatmeal/rye beer that
would, as he said, “would sweep every competition in Germany, in
Europe as well as in America.” Then he took me on a tour and we
spent a couple hours drinking beer and talking about beer. It was fun
but I had to get the article done so I excused myself and went back
home to write.
The article had to
be 2,000 words and I had to have it done by 4:30 so I kissed Edith,
grabbed a sandwich and locked myself in my office, which doubled as
our bedroom but it worked well in either situation. It didn't take
long...about an hour...but I got it done and emailed off to my boss I
had it done at 2:30 so I went down and watched some TV with Edith.
A few minutes
later I heard an alarm going off on the computer. I rushed in and saw
that there was an email from my boss. I opened it and it just had two
sentences. It said, “Are you being funny sending me your article in
German? Rewrite and send in English od don't expect to write any
anymore for us!
I quickly got to
my emails and opened the one I sent to my boos. I opened the file and
saw that it was written as I had written it. It was there and it was
in German. “What in the hell,” I said. Then I opened the file
that I had saved on my desktop and it too was written in German. “I
know I wrote this in English,” I yelled.
Then I decided to
perform a test. I wrote a small sentence into my word processor. It
read, “The dog ran across the grass.” Then I saved it to my
computer. Okay, I thought, that should work. But when I opened the
file I saw that it read...”Der Hund lief über den Rasen.” That
was strange and there was no explanation as to why it would re-write
itself.
I spent the rest
of the day and all of the night trying to figure out what was going
on. I called some computer expert friends of mine and they couldn't
offer any help. Finally, a teenager from next door, who had heard me
yelling, came over and he told me that the German language program I
had used put a translation program into my computer so that anything
I wrote would automatically be rewritten into German. Then he came up
with an idea that, for all the pain of this glitch, it could be fixed
rather easily.
He and I went down
to a computer store and looked around until we found what we
wanted...an English language program from the same publisher. We
thought that if it worked one way it just may work in the opposite
way once it was installed.
I got home,
installed the program and rewrote the article, in German this time. I
didn't wait. I just emailed it right off to the newspaper. A minute
later I got this email, “Even though you are late, thank you for
rewriting the article. At least now I can read it. Will send your
next assignment tomorrow.”
The thing is, for
it being a pain in the butt glitch, it worked rather well. If I was
writing to a German I would type the letter in English and mail it
off and the same if I am writing to a person who speaks English. The
message would be written in German and received in English.
All I can say is
that if programmers keep making glitches it make make communicating
between countries a lot easier.
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