Captain of the ship
Further thoughts on the previous post.I wrote “as long as I’m captain of the ship, I’ll be happy”. Notice how the ship doesn’t have any sailors? Yeah. Perhaps I should say “as long as I’m captain of this kayak…” (and then I’ll drool, because I really would love to have a kayak, but that’s another story). I have no grand hope/project of managing underlings (see how I’d treat them, calling them underlings (also? office monkeys!)? It does not bode well!) and no desire to. Well, hold on, I’ll qualify that. As a translator, the way to move “up” on your own is to get a (virtual) team together so you can accept “too many” jobs and dispatch them to your team members, keeping some small(ish) percentage of the total (and usually revising the work before sending it off). And that’s something I could consider… in a few years. That’s it really: I know it could be very smart (I also know it could be really complicated and annoying — just finding someone with whom I work well and whose work I consider at par with mine (not that I’ve got translation superpowers, you understand, but I do have a firm grasp of grammar and spelling, etc.!) is difficult and time/energy-consuming), but I always think “sure, maybe… in a few years”! Objectively that makes sense, since I should get all the experience I can before managing somebody else’s work. But really? It’s my way of not saying “I’m not sure that great idea would be so great for me”. It’s not off the table, but it’s buried under tons of unread newspapers, kinda thing.
Even though there’s no way I’ll ever know, I still wonder to what extent being an only child made me so… let’s say independent. Autonomous? Hmm… Self-reliant? I’m getting closer. It’s probably not that crucial — not as much as my early reality, which was to be the only child not only in my family but in the entire area, with our house the only four-season house at the end of an unpaved country road with no traffic, with a large dog and parents who allowed me to wander — far and every day. I think I developed my sense of self without realizing life implies interactions with other members of the same species (in any case that’s where most of my challenges lie, and it was difficult for me as a child to deal with groups… Huh: sometimes it still is!). The result is that I’m extremely lucky to live at a time where self-employment is a growing trend*: I’d probably have ended up self-employed eventually otherwise, but it would have been such a fight! So all at once I feel disconnected from many trends (let’s be honest: I feel old and archaic) AND I fit right in. I swear, paradox should be my middle name.
Not having office monkeys (see, there’s no way I could resist calling them that!) also means not putting anyone else at risk. Okay, so I don’t consider my work and life are “at risk”, but I just wouldn’t enjoy being responsible for someone’s livelihood. It would stress me out. I guess that’s my comfort zone: self-employment is not a problem, but employing others would be too much. So I guess I’m a micro-entrepreneur at heart. ;-P
*40% increase in 20 years; over 550,000 self-employed persons in Québec in 2007 (Source in French).
