Excuses, excuses...

I've not written a blog post for several weeks simply because I've been working about 12 hours a day. The beauty of the freelance site on which I list my editing and proofreading services is that I never know who is going to send what kind of work my way. That can be either serendipitous or overwhelming. I encourage clients with large projects to contact me in advance to discuss my schedule, but not everyone heeds that request, and the past two weeks, I've just been deluged. Great for the bank account, not so good for the blog.

They call them 'deadlines' for a good reason.

One of my big projects came from a human resources software company in India. They are maintaining a blog featuring posts related to various HR topics. The catch is, the posts have been written by many different people with writing skills all over the place. My job was to clean them up and, to the extent possible, standardise them. As I was frantically working away on the vast amount of verbiage, racing the somewhat tight deadline, it occurred to me that the tables have turned in my universe.  Back in the days when I was climbing the IT professional ladder in the US, the talk was of outsourcing work to India. And now, here I sit in Phnom Penh, receiving outsourced work from India.

One of my favourite things about my work is that I learn new things just about every day. Not all of them, however, please me.  The corporate world -- and HR in particular, I think -- has always had an unfortunate tendency to coin new and ever more deplorable jargon. The latest travesty: On-boarding. It's what you do with your newly-hired staff -- you on-board them. Back in my day, we called it orientation, and if we needed to use the verb form, those of us with any respect for the English language would say "orient". HR people said "orientate", but as they handled payroll, who was going to argue with them? Hearing the term "on-boarding", though, has the same effect on me as water-boarding. It makes me want to exit (the new catch-all for quitting, retiring, or being fired) and give 'em an earful during my out-boarding (formerly known as an exit interview).  

 Should I start outsourcing the Phenomenal Penguin posts to freelancers? I could send my photos and notes on my recent trip to Battambang to someone in Hyderabad and see what turns up. Actually, I think I won't.  My ghost-writer probably wouldn't appreciate my observations about the very portly, older Indian lady who struggled mightily to board the boat up the Tonle Sap river in her voluminous sari. Sometimes, Madam, Eddie Bauer is the better part of valour.