From 2005 to 2008 I maintained a blog about my experiences working in the drug test industry. Every Sunday I revive one of those experiences here. The following was originally posted April 11, 2006.
The Two-Story Translator
At about 9am a young lady walks into my office requiring a pre-employment drug test for a landscaping company. She does not speak English.
This particular landscaping company has a long, sordid history of being very much against the idea of providing translators for their new-hires. The fact that I speak no Spanish is not unknown to them. I don’t know why they refuse to send translators; it’s not like they don’t have any on-hand. Many of the Mexican workers who come in for a drug test are bilingual already, how hard would it be to call one over and send him out with a new-hire to make sure the drug test goes down properly.
Any way you slice it, I can’t do the collection. I have no choice but to turn the young lady away.
She returns after lunch with an employee of the same company. I ask him if he is going to serve as translator. He nods and says “okay”.
“Okay” is a red-flag word. It’s deceptively easy to get through a conversation by just nodding and saying “okay” whenever the person you’re listening to pauses in their speech. I lob a couple lowball questions at the translator to test his English capabilities. As it turns out he knows precious little English at all. not even enough to help the young lady tell me her phone number. Again I have no choice but to turn them away.
Ten minutes before closing time they return, this time accompanied by a white woman who very obviously works in the air-conditioned part of the company’s dealings. “Hi,” she says impatiently, “is there some problem here?”
I explain to the woman, just like I have to various other members of her company, over and over again, that I do not speak Spanish and I can not conduct a collection unless the donor speaks English.
“Well all she has to do is pee in a cup right?”
Sigh. It’s the “only a drug test” argument. I wonder how this woman would react if one of their landscaping crews uprooted someone’s flower bed. Somehow I doubt she’d respond with “Well it’s only your front lawn right?”
I briefly explain the process, the do-not-flush thing, the empty-your-pockets thing, and I show her the block on the form the donor needs to sign.
Now, I have no illusions that everyone who comes in for a drug test actually reads the form before signing it. Most people are so jaded that they just sign anything and everything you point to. My personal take on the issue is that if you have the ability to read it, and decide not to, that is your thing. But if you do not have the ability to read it, it’s my job to ensure you know what it says before you sign. I meet a lot of people who are illiterate, or who don’t have their glasses, or speak English perfectly well but can’t read it, and to those people I cheerfully read the two lines of text aloud. But in the case of foreign language translations, nothing short of an actual bilingual translator can get the job done. This solution, while painfully obvious to me, continues to elude the landscaping company in question and specifically the increasingly-irritated woman standing before me.
“Well, why can’t he translate?”
I shrug, and look at the translator again, and ask him in plain English, “Sir, are you able to translate for me?”
He blinks a few times and then looks at the supervisor woman, helplessly.
She repeats what I said, except louder and slower. When that doesn’t work, she rewords it as “Can you talk English? To him? Like this?” She holds up one hand and pantomimes a mouth opening and closing, while pointing to her own mouth with the other hand.
He nods and says “okay.”
“There,” says the supervisor, “what’s the problem?”
The problem is that I’m not fooled. The problem is that I’m not a complete retard. The problem is that your goddamned company wants to capitalize on the cheap labor offered by a Mexican work force (illegal or otherwise) and the tax benefits of getting them all drug tested without accepting the responsibility to get it done properly.
The part of the form the young lady is eventually going to have to sign, I ask the translator to read to me in English. He can’t get passed the second word (the first word is “I”). It is so painfully obvious that this man, excellent landscaper though he may be, simply does not speak English and simply can not serve as a translator. A five-year-old could see it.
“Ma’am,” I tell the supervisor, “unless you speak Spanish and can translate, I am going to have to discontinue this collection process.” That’s a polite way of saying “get the hell out of my office, it’s after five and I want to go home.”
“What if I help him with the things he doesn’t understand?”
“What do you mean?”
“I can translate for him.”
“You’re going to translate for the translator?”
“He’ll listen to me.”
I envision in my mind the kind of work environment this woman deals with. She is probably highly skilled at getting a crew of Spanish-speaking workers where they need to be, doing what they need to get done, and doing it very efficiently. But outside of her little landscaping world, things don’t work like that. It’s easy to hand a rake to someone, point them at a pile of leaves, and let them figure it out. What I do at my office is something different entirely.
“So you want to translate for me, and then have this man translate for you.”
“Can we hurry this up please?”
“But he doesn’t speak English.”
“He does, you say he doesn’t, whatever.”
“And you don’t speak Spanish.”
“He’ll listen to me.”
I walk out, take my OPEN sign off the window, and turn off the lobby lights. “Okay,” I tell her, “we’ll give it one shot. If it doesn’t work you’re going to have to send her back tomorrow with a proper translator.” I realize that statement is meaningless to her, so I follow up by explaining that a translator is someone who is bilingual, and can hold conversations in two different languages (in this case English and Spanish) be they verbal or written.
I give all my instructions. The supervisor repeats them louder, leaving out verbs, the way one would talk to a dog. The translator stumbles around with some clumsy Spanish. The donor looks very confused. Eventually the supervisor snaps the cup from my hand, gives it to the donor and points to the bathroom.
As she’s going in, I remind her not to flush the toilet. The helpful supervisor sums this up as “No this,” with a hand gesture that tries to mimic water circling a toilet bowl. To me it looks like she’s stirring soup.
Even through the language barrier, handing someone an empty cup and pointing them at a bathroom is a pretty easy message to get across. The donor emerges with a full cup, the sound of a freshly flushed toilet echoing through the hallway.
The supervisor is angry when I tell her it’s a botched collection. The donor did not follow my instructions because, despite having two translators at hand, she did not understand what they were. The supervisor barks at the donor to “drink aqua” as fast as she could so she could go again.
“No, ma’am, she will have to come back tomorrow with a proper translator.”
“She’ll get it right next time, she just–”
“It’s after five. I’m closed. She doesn’t speak English. You aren’t a translator. He isn’t a translator. This collection is over.”
I throw away the cup and break eye contact. The supervisor tries to protest but eventually just stomps out with her Mexican underlings in tow.
As for me, I still don’t speak Spanish.
The very next day the same man came in, supposedly sent to translate for a completely different new-hire. Something is seriously wrong with that company.
Like everyone else on the internet, I once teamed up with an artist to make a webcomic. It didn’t get very far, but I’ll share one here each Saturday until there aren’t anymore. Enjoy.
I’m flying into Ohio today to surprise my dad on his 50th birthday. (Don’t worry, by the time this goes live I’ll already be there and it’ll no longer be a surprise.)
Instead of an update, I’ll pose a question: now that I have a PSP, what are some good PSP games I can pick up on the cheap? I really don’t know a lot about what’s on the system outside of the five or six games that had caught my eye (the Mega Man remakes, MGS:PO, Crisis Core, Patapon… wasn’t there a tilty chicken game or something?), so recommendations on what I can look for when I go trawling through the used rack at Gamestop are appreciated.
Not that I particularly need any new PSP games in the near future; Dissidia is going to take a long time to clear, then there are like six other games I need to pick up for various consoles. Good lord, but it feels good to be back in the swing of things!
Nomic and Peemeister entries will go up over the weekend, and I’ll be back on Monday with a something.
I’ve played through about half of the story mode in Dissidia, and all the various game elements are starting to click. I can’t shake the feeling, though, that the game is held back by its strict adherence to a set of rules about what could and couldn’t be included.
Remember how Smash Bros. Melee had Mario, Luigi, Peach and Bowser all in the same game? And Fox and Falco? And like 14 Pokeymans? Imagine, instead of just putting awesome characters in from wherever they happened to come from, they decided to use only one hero/villain pair from each series. So they could use Link and Ganondorf, but not Zelda. Mario and Bowser, but not Peach. And they’d have to really reach pretty far to find villains from the more obscure entries. Ice Climbers vs. Polar Bear! Andross instead of Falco!
That’s kind of what happened to Dissidia. Everyone wants to play as Cloud and Squall and Terra, and that’s awesome, but some of these villains are barely characters. Cloud of Darkness? Really? And Ultimecia? Did Ultimecia even have more than four lines? Is she really the best choice, considering Edea and Seifer both come from the same game and are both much more interesting?
Some of the hero choices were misses, too. FF heroes tend to be Dudes With Swords, which means the majority of the Dissidia roster gives you your choice of which Dude and which Sword you’d like to use. They try to mix this up in places, but that only really works in the older games where weapons aren’t as iconic. They can get away with giving Cecil a spear, But Cloud, Squall and Tidus are practically defined by the weapons they carry.
I realize it’s just not possible to have a game with absolutely every character ever, and twenty characters is already a pretty lofty number. But why not nix the characters nobody cares about and give the games with more popular casts higher representation? The Warrior of Light doesn’t even look like any of the guys from FF1. Nobody would miss him if he were gone. Leave Garland in to represent the ol’ grandaddy game, and use your free slot for Kain, or Auron, or Vivi, or any of the Cids.
Seriously, there isn’t one single playable Cid in this whole game. That’s just… it’s just criminal. And the decision to include Giant Armor Guy from FF12 as a hidden character, where he can exist alongside all the other Giant Armor Guys, rather than any of FF12’s awesome player characters… ugh. I hope someone got fired over that.
On the other hand, none of the characters are Dr. Mario. So I guess that’s good. (The game itself is good too, of course, or I wouldn’t have wasted 500 words on it.)
First off, I started my new job! Having been laid off since… oh, a couple days before I started this site back in February it felt amazing to finally get back out there and do something productive. The severely reduced financial burden and the eventual acquisition of health and dental insurance is pretty much just gravy.
To celebrate my return to the workforce, my beloved Peanut surprised me with a gift of a brand new PSP and Dissidia: Final Fantasy which, despite being exhausted from lack of sleep and aformentioned new job I happily spent several hours devouring. I’ll probably discuss both the game and the PSP at greater length in future posts.
Finally, it looks like that goddamn malware attack warning has finally evaporated. That was starting to really bug me (and, by extension, everyone I was constantly bugging about it).
This blog has helped keep me sane during the brutal months of stress, financial insecurity and humiliating job searches that go along with unemployment. It sounds sappy but really committing to putting something here every single day gave me a sense of purpose and a reason to get out of bed in the morning. (Er, or in the afternoon, as the case may be.)
I would like to think I can keep the daily updates going even though my free time is going to be reduced, and even though what remains of it can once again be filled with the plentiful gaming that comes along with a loosened budget. I’ve always had more ideas than will to execute them, and this site has helped turned that around a bit. I’d love to see where, if anywhere, it takes me.
I was working on something for today, but I’m putting it on hold to see what I can do about this attack warning Google has plastered all over the site. No point working on new content that nobody is going to read anyway, right? I’ll be back tomorrow with this week’s vlog.
In the meantime, here’s my review of Inglorious Basterds: see it immediately.
From 2005 to 2008 I maintained a blog about my experiences working in the drug test industry. Every Sunday I revive one of those experiences here. The following was originally posted April 11, 2006.
Jailbait.
The people I deal with on a daily basis sometimes infuriate me, sometimes bore me, and sometimes even delight me… but only rarely do they honestly creep me out. That was until yesterday, when I met Old Man Shortshorts.
Old Man Shortshorts was a tiny, wrinkled scab of a man. He stood about five-foot-nothing. He wore a t-shirt advertising the 1999 Senior Fun Walk and a pair of tiny red shorts, showing off the mass of his liver spot encrusted legs. His voice was gravely and harsh, just one step above the guy who needs the handheld voice-box held up to his throat to speak. This alone was creepy enough, but then in walked his wife.
Lady Shortshorts had to have been my age or younger. She was a good six feet tall. I’m certain she was his wife and not, say, his granddaughter because they wore matching wedding bands and he kept on grabbing her butt. She had a thick European accent I had a hard time identifying. The whole situation just freaked me out something bad.
Old Man Shortshorts didn’t do anything remarkably annoying. His collection was smooth and painless; he didn’t ask stupid questions, he didn’t complain about the pockets thing or the wallet thing or the ID thing. But the fact remains that he bought a European woman less than one-third his age. Ew. Just ew.
I wanted to shower vigorously after Old Man Shortshorts and his knockout foreign wife left my office.
I guess maybe I’m being unfair. For all I know it could be true love. But it’s still creepy true love.
Like everyone else on the internet, I once teamed up with an artist to make a webcomic. It didn’t get very far, but I’ll share one here each Saturday until there aren’t anymore. Enjoy.
Let’s get one thing straight: Shadow Complex is not Super Metroid. Pretty much the entire internet is buzzing about how it is Super Metroid. The developers have bragged about how much they cribbed from Super Metroid. There was probably some stirring in Nintendo’s legal team. But they needn’t worry; Shadow Complex is not Super Metroid.
That having been cleared up, the question is how close did it get? Answer: damn close. Closer than probably any game I’ve played since… well, since Super Metroid. Close enough that you can tell the guys who designed it got their ideas from a specific game rather than a vague genre.
Freeform platformers are nothing new. A lot of people like the term Metroidvania (excepting the guy who originally coined it), but really only a subset of these games are inspired by the Metroid/Castlevania design philosophy. By which I really mean the Metroid philosophy, because Castlevania was the first to so closely imitate what Metroid had already done. The design of the map, the idea that new areas are blocked off by your limited skillset, treasure and upgrades hidden in every nook and cranny… these are some of the features that set those two series apart from games like Cave Story, Shantae or Mega Man ZX.
Well, now Shadow Complex stands with them. But much, much closer to the Super Metroid side of the family. It doesn’t associate so much with its crazy uncle Dawn of Sorrow who drinks too much and makes a fool of himself. And the less said about his short-bus-special second cousin Metroid Fusion, the better.
The biggest deviation Shadow Complex takes from its Super Metroid roots is the large focus on combat. In Super Metroid your biggest adversary was the world itself, and if you were focusing a lot of your energy on making something die it’s because you were locked in a boss room. Shadow Complex kind of dilutes that intensity over the entire game; you’re still spending most of your time trying to figure out how to get from one point on your map to another point, but stepping into a room your first concern is going to be “now how do I take out all these guys?” Early on when you have a small amount of health and a sissy little handgun this can be a real challenge. Working in your favor are all the little environmental quirks you can use to dispatch bad guys. If there’s a robot within reach you can shoot it down and kick it at them as a sort of makeshift bomb. Sometimes you can crush them with bits of scenery. Sometimes they’re marching around next to exploding barrels. On many tricky screens a little bit of observation can save you from a prolonged and dangerous gunfight.
Unfortunately combat is also the clumsiest aspect of the game. Aiming has been a problem in Metroid games for as long as there have been Metroid games. Initially Samus could shoot only forward or upwards, leaving her helpless to reach the little insect monsters crawling around on the ground. Later she could aim up and down at an angle, but that uses up two shoulder buttons which could have been used to further streamline all her other abilities. By the time she got to the GBA the d-pad got involved causing movement when you wanted to aim and aiming when you wanted to move.
Shadow Complex’s solution is to use the right thumbstick to aim wherever you want. Which… doesn’t work very well, actually. I’ve never been very good at aiming in games; I always tend to want to carefully line up my shot first (helped along in Shadow Complex by a fairly precise laser sight) which usually leads to me soaking up a lot of damage. I did a lot of this in Shadow Complex. In the scenes where I wasn’t afforded the luxury of time and had to rely more on my instincts I constantly found myself in trouble because I had been shooting a degree or two over some jackass’s head rather than hitting him. That caused a few deaths.
Compounding the problem, enemies often lurk in the background. Shadow Complex is a 2D game, but the game world is 3D. You can only interact with things on your little slice of the Z-axis, but bad guys can be anywhere they want. This causes more problems than I think it solves, largely because it’s difficult to tell what is and isn’t “solid” on the screen. More than once I made a jump to what I thought was a safe platform only to go plummeting through a piece of scenery; more often it was just a pain figuring out where my bullets were going to travel. There’s not a lot of play between “aim at a guy who is 37 degrees above you” and “aim at a guy who is on your level but occupies a place on the screen that looks to be 37 degrees above you”. If you’re right on you’ll hit your mark, but if you’re slighly off your bullets will sail harmlessly across the room in front of whatever you were trying to hit.
Death often comes swiftly. My jaw dropped at how quick my health went down in some firefights. If you go underwater you drown almost immediately. There are quite a few “step in the room and die” moments which have no analogue in Super Metroid. This caught me off-guard but didn’t really bother me since save rooms were so plentiful, but it’s worth noting.
So the combat kind of doesn’t work, and there is a lot of it. I’ve always felt that the challenge in games like this should come from the world, as noted above, and not its inhabitants. I like to approach these games as a puzzle box rather than a gauntlet, so I had no problem playing Shadow Complex on Normal rather than Insane difficulty. In this regard I think the game works really well. You start off with a flashlight which is the functional equivalent of Super Metroid’s X-Ray Scope; shining it around will reveal parts of the environment you can destroy with your various guns and abilities. Closely examining the map reveals where you need to go but often not how to get there; I spent a lot of time looking for areas that needed to be explored more thoroughly and, indeed, this turned up a lot of secret areas and pickups.
The world is fairly large, and there aren’t enough shortcuts. There’s a giant surface area which you can clear one end to the other once you have the mobility, and there’s a straight shot at the bottom the hero even clearly identifies as a shortcut, but anywhere in-between is just you slogging through the map. There seems to be a large variety of paths and interconnections between the various game areas, but this can be misleading as sometimes paths are one-way for whatever reason. There were a couple times I thought I was taking the quickest route to my goal, only to find that the path was blocked from my direction and I was pointed the wrong way entirely. (I especially liked the death laser room. By which I mean, I didn’t like it at all and it made me want to die. And then killed me.)
Setting and story: blah blah blah unimportant. I’ve seen folks mention how “refreshing” it is to play this style of game outside of a sci-fi or gothic setting, but honestly I don’t care. Here’s the plot as I understand it: you are Some Dude, and there is this Big Underground Dungeon. Get to work, fatty.
I believe I wrote more about Shadow Complex this week than I did about Bioshock, which should be some indication of where my priorities lie. Interestingly the two games have something in common: I guessed the plot twist in Shadow Complex too, and for largely the same reason. I figured things were too straightforward, but only one twist made sense. And, well, wouldn’t you know…
So this game was, what… fifteen bucks? I’d have paid thirty. Combat sucks but after some growing pains you have enough armor and firepower to pretty much just mow everything down. There were a lot of spots where I was just downright stumped and had to dig in to that good, creamy part of my brain that holds my somewhat atrophied Metroid Sense. The last boss sequence was very well done (if a little cheesy). I’d get it, if I were you.
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