Big in Japan

Dear Tamoko Watanabi (name has been changed),

Thank you for your concern regarding my ability to read the pencil scratches you have left in the margins of your scanned manuscript j-peg files. I really think it is polite that you take responsibility for your sloppy penmanship. Oh, and that reminds me, thank you for scanning each page of your 200+ page document, and saving them all as individual sideways j-peg files which each take approximately 30 seconds to download, and an additional 2 minutes to crop and zoom into. You must have correctly assumed that I was joking when I asked you to save them as one big PDF file. It was a funny joke, wasn't it?

Oh, and I almost forgot, thank you for emailing each of those j-pegs to my personal account instead of sending it via the internet, using one of the three choice transferring methods I listed in a step-by-step fashion in a previous email. Your innovation has proven much more convenient. Also it is fun for me to reorganize my personal inbox and to spend twice as much time reformatting your mistakes. Fun.

If I am forgetting anything, I am truly sorry, for I am indebted to you in oh so many ways.

Cordially,

Natalie Pendergast


That is what I wish I could write in an email to a client of mine. Unfortunately, the sarcastic tone that I wish to express would not register. Tamoko Watanabi is a Japanese professor. She has written a book, and, thanks to the advice of a mutual connection, employed me as the indexer.

At the beginning, we thought the matter of my living in Quebec and her living in Japan would not be a big deal, especially since communicating via Internet is so easy. But over the past month or so, I have discovered that one person's perception of "easy" is not the same as another's.

Tamoko sucks at computers. She makes using the computer for a simple task into an impossible feat that is complicated, discouraging and emotionally stressful. What's worse, she is embarrassed about it, so when she makes mistakes, or doesn't get it, she will just pretend everything is perfect. Weeks later, I am stuck with correcting her errors.

She has also requested my help with acquiring English language books and sending them to her as PDF files, as well as correcting her spelling and grammatical errors in her book. However, she did not tell me she was expecting my help in these areas until after she expected me to have finished them.

I did bring to her attention some common mistakes she was making. For example, since she learned French as a second language and English as a third language, she sometimes makes the same mistakes as a French person would make; i.e.:

When she says,

"Canadian literature is well-known at the Japan."

Of course she means to say,

"Canadian literature is well-known in Japan,"

but since she learned to say,

"La littérature canadienne est bien connue au Japon,”

which literally translates to,

“Canadian literature is well-known at the Japan,”

one can see how easy it is to make errors. And when I wrote back that she could even say,

“Canadian literature is big in Japan,”

she was completely confused.

Eventually I have stopped struggling to make Tamoko understand either abstract concepts, English idioms or computer stuff. Now I just let her do things her way, no matter how long it takes her, how inconvenient it is for me, or how little effort she makes to communicate with me. I’m just too tired of listing out step-by-step instructions over and over again for her.

And I think she is very intelligent and hard working. She is a professional and she writes books. Writing and getting published is no cinch. I just think she is too impatient to take the time to learn something new. I think she is too mentally lazy to think about things from a new perspective.

One thing she has got going for her, though: She is the most polite person I have ever met, on or off the internet.