other Crosswords: regime change

Posted March 23, 2006 • Comments Off on Crosswords: regime change

I have decided that two factors are keeping me from posting crossword puzzles. Three. Three factors.

Factor one: Scanning them takes forever.
Factor two: Typing in all the answers and comments and gathering the links takes forever.
Factor three: My newspaper carrier is a total incompetent and I haven’t even received a complete Sunday paper in a month. A fucking month.

Here is how I’m solving this.

Factor one: I’m going to take pictures of them instead of scanning them.
Factor two: I’m going to post the comments and links for things I learned, but not the theme answers, unless they were really cool puns that week. This is rare.
Factor three: I’m so frakking mad. How hard is it to deliver a newspaper? A nagging thought is that my neighbor is stealing it, but somehow I don’t think so. I do plan to stay up or get up this weekend, though, and watch for it. This week I bought a Sunday paper at the 7-11 on Tuesday morning. You know, I’m being charged the same ($1.50 a week) for the paper as if I bought it at the newsstand. If the paper doesn’t show up with one hundred percent predictable accuracy, why should I pay for it to be delivered at all?

I put “regime change” in the subject line so I can tell you this non-crossword-related anecdote.

There’s a department at work that typesets some of the IMF’s documents in French. They are, far and away, my biggest “customers.” This week and last week, I spent an average of two hours a day teaching them to use InDesign. It’s exhausting.

I thank my lucky stars that I can inject humor into our time together without alienating them. Like all French people (although one of them is Vietnamese, one is Indonesian, and one is Canadian*), they think it’s hilarious when I try to speak French.

Often it’s necessary to say the French words that are on the screen in order to direct a user to the right area of the document. When the French word is also English, like regime or voila or panache, it’s fine. When the French is something I can easily translate due to years of experience, like oil-producing countries or percentage, I just say it in English. It’s the other times that get me in trouble.

However, on Wednesday I needed to direct them to change some settings on a line of a table that contained the word regime. And somehow I managed to say “We need a regime change there.” Big laughs.

The end.

*I’m sure the Vietnamese one is Vietnamese. I’m sure the two French ones are French. I assume the Canadian one is Canadian from the way she speaks English. And the one who I’m guessing is Indonesian? That’s a wild stab, but her last name has—I am not joking or guessing—sixteen letters, and I can’t think of another part of the world with names this crazy where some of the people speak French.