There's always a catch

Thanks to one of the PhD students for whom I proofread, I've received a couple of job requests since I've been back in the States, and have actually been able to complete one. The difficult part was figuring out how to work the payment. In the past, this was a simple matter of meeting up at the library, pocketing the cash, and having take-away without having to visit the Tesco cash machine. Seeing as we're now on different continents, however, I figured the hand-off wasn't going to work.

My next thought was the simple envelope method, having my client drop a £20 note in an envelope and mail it to me, but that had two minor complications: postage and currency conversion. The only place around that will exchange currency is a bank in downtown Birmingham, and I didn't want to drive all the way in for 20 quid.

After a quick chat with my bank manager, we decided to try the wire transfer method, which was guaranteed to work unless the British bank chose to do what they do best and give my international student a hard time. Everything worked, miraculously enough, and when I checked my account today, the cash was there, as was a $15 wire transfer fee.

D'oh.

I have another job coming up, and much as I hate doing it, I'm tacking a little extra onto my rate to cover the wire costs. Silly financial institutions.

My other forehead-smack-inducing moment of the day came from a little side project I'm doing, helping my mother time-stamp about two-dozen tapes. Having never done this before, and uncertain of what exactly she would want in a good clip, I fell back upon transcribing the tapes verbatim and making notations of when interviews begin and end.

Well, a five-minute interview window is nice, but doesn't help much in locating a single sound bite. I spent a good bit of the time I'd hoped to continue with the next tape fixing the previous two transcriptions, but at least there's a bright side to this - unlike the other transcriptions I've done, I can understand all the accents on these tapes. Hallelujah.

On happier notes, I signed my first contract for publication rights to a short story today (for V, the creative writing program's new anthology), I saw an old friend for a movie tonight, I've got a "networking" meeting tomorrow afternoon, and tomorrow night will be both the Greek Food Fest and the Sidewalk Film Fest. Opa, baby.