Job

        Well, I've been at my job for about 2.5 weeks. Enough for me to tell you a little bit about it, past “I coordinate interpreters at UCSF.” Which is basically what I do.

        UCSF is located at the top of a freakin' mountain in the middle of San Francisco. Parnassus Heights campus, you can Google it. So it takes a little while to get there in the morning. I leave the house at 647am, make it to BART for the 658 train to the city, switch to the Muni Metro 4 stops into the city, around 730, and then ride that train for 10 or 15 minutes to the UCSF front doorstep. Convenient, though lengthy process.

        The bulk of my job consists of answering phones and scheduling medical interpreters for a vast number of patient visits. I'm not even kidding, we schedule interpreters for like 500 patients in one day. FIVE HUNDRED. At least. That's more non-English-speaking patients than students at Bethel. We have three teams of in-house interpreters – Chinese (3), Russian (1), and Spanish (5), all of whom meet in my office along with 2 dispatchers and my supervisor. It's a busy office, and very multicultural. I am the only white non-immigrant employee, I'm pretty sure. The interpreters are very interesting people, and it's fun to talk to them during down times.  One of the staffmembers left this Friday.  Her name was Ilona, and she is super cool.  She was born in Lithuania, attended Russian schools, speaks Polish, Russian Sign, Lithuanian, Russian, French, English, and Yiddish, and is the NICEST person.  She also quilts, and has heard of the Mennonites! Unfortunately, she's gone now, but it was cool to get to know her for a couple of weeks.  The other woman in the photo is Ignacia, one of the other dispatchers.  

         There aren't that many downtimes. The phones ring off the hooks most of the time, jammed with UCSF staff asking where their interpreters are, or wanting to schedule interpreters, or demanding to know where their interpreters are. Everyone has a schedule at the hospital, and if one person is thrown off their schedule, it causes a HUGE ripple effect, with our translators and us at the bottom of the heap. We all get a lot of flak, mostly because a lot of the people at the hospital don't know how to schedule interpreters, and get upset when we don't understand and fix the many and varied ways in which they try to circumvent the system. There are some very angry and unprofessional people out there. It's good office bonding, though.

Since the hospital is located at the top of a mountain, it has GREAT views. I have started eating lunch on the roof of the library, which offers a 180 degree panoramic view from the ocean to Downtown. Here are a few photos, but they don't really do a good job.

So that's my job. I like it. It's busy, sometimes VERY busy, but I needed a challenge after a year out of school, and this was it.