Stressful Clerical Work

I know clerical work and "stress" don't typically go together in a sentence, but today was indeed one of the most stressful clerical work experience I have ever had in my life.

On resumes, clerical work sounds so mundane and simple, but somehow when you're in China, it is an unforeseen obstacle that you have to hurl yourself over. I often have little to nothing to do in the office, and am left to my own mischief, granted free internet access and a free meal a day. Today though, I was given more opportunities, but it may have been over my head. What is perceived as a simple task of typing up a handwritten 5-page document is in fact like trying to read some alien language written backwards and upside down. Yes, it was that difficult.

I've been studying Chinese since I was 5, but somehow handwritten Chinese is still some foreign script to me, especially in simplified Chinese. I blame it on the reduced strokes in each character, which makes guessing that much harder. Combined with the fact that it is 草字, written in Chinese shorthand, and my boss has bad handwriting, I was panicked as to how I could turn this in to him at the end of the day. In theory, it wasn't hard at all. I mean, yes, I can type Chinese just fine, and my average wpm is faster than all the people in my office. However, my main problem was deciphering what my boss had written on the page. To give an example of the difficulties I had, his "人" looked like an "L", and his “发” looked like a scribbled 3 with maybe a stray dot. Fortunately I was not reduced to tears out of frustration, and did my best to type what I could understand, leaving everything else (a large majority) in question marks. I then asked my coworkers to read it out to me instead, as I could type as fast as they could read. I felt bad, because it was 5 pages long, but I seriously could not have finished it otherwise. It took 3 of us combined to get it done, but even then, there were parts that we couldn't decipher from his poor handwriting. Most stressful ordeal ever, something that topped my translation of the equity transfer agreement, since this was for my boss, the boss of everyone at the entire firm. The language itself wasn't hard, maybe in reality 5-10 words I didn't know of the entire document. It was just that I couldn't read his handwriting. “国” looked like "网," so my eyes were crossed like three times over trying to figure out what was what. However, I think I started getting used to it. I may have simply needed a legend. This = this character, because while his handwriting was difficult to read, it did have a certain level of uniformity, and when they could not help me, I could go back and see what a similar squiggle was and apply it to a latter part of the document.

I also sent out an EMS today for another coworker who had to leave early to court in another city (poor lady). Semi-stressful, but the task was easy compared to before. I simply had to copy the information onto the form correctly (which thankfully was very legible; she kindly took into consideration of my limited Chinese skills and wrote it as clearly as she could) and give the money to the delivery man. I think this experience has gone to show me that A) I seriously need like a Chinese 101 in deciphering 草字/Chinese cursive, B) my Chinese needs some major improvement, it's all gone downhill without the academic environment, and C) I need to keep up with my reading skills, because while I actually know a lot of characters, I'm never certain whether I was right, even though my instinct is usually dead on. *sigh* All in due time. Am excited to meet up with all the Nanjing Flagship kids tomorrow though for hot pot! It'll be nice to catch up.