Other Duties as Assigned

December 17, 2009 by
Filed under: Lessons Learned 

Every employee hates to hear that phrase, “other duties as assigned.” Bosses add that bit of lingo to cover those odd jobs that come your way. No longer can you cop out of a job saying, “That’s not in my job description.” Read the fine print. It’s there.

I had one of those assignments the other day. The boss asked me to print a document, which I did. When I looked it over to make all the pages were there, I noticed that it wasn’t in English, only the abstract. I took it back to the boss and told him. “Well, yes,” he said, “I’m going to get a translation done.”

The document was pretty long, over eight pages in fine type. Being the dutiful employee that I am, I thought that maybe I could give it a try. There are, after all, online services that will translate a document.

Of course, this had to be a more complicated process. First, I had to convert the PDF to a DOC file. That wasn’t too hard. The next thing was finding a translator site. I managed to find that too. So, I had the document converted into English.

There’s a bit of a catch when using an automated service. There are bound to be errors. Part of the translation went well, because it was science terminology. That’s pretty straight forward. Every now and again, a glaring error would practically pop off the page. I was able to score some brownie points and give my boss a few laughs, but next time, get a live person to do the free translation.

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