Bob Sanchez’ BS

I followed this guy’s advice; I came to a fork in the road and I took it.

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Teaching English in Japan is not the kind of job that contributes to a career. I knew that coming in and never meant for the job to be any more than a way to put food on the dinner table and a futon on my floor.

The prospect of doing it for yet another school year depressed me. Sure, the students were great and I enjoyed daily interaction with the school staff, but it has been a dead-end road since Day One and the plan was to get off that road before it came to the dead-end.

Baseball scouting is wonderful, but the hard fact is that it is not exactly lining my pockets. I tried and tried to get some freelance translating going, but nobody seemed to be giving out jobs. I’d sent out resumes and performed trials for a handful of companies but hadn’t heard from them through the middle of May.

School was sucking the life out of me and there seemed to be no end to the baseball limbo that I still find myself in. My motivation was dwindling and I was asking every day, “What’s next?”

I got my answer at the end of May. One of the translating brokers who liked my samples sent me a six-page transcript of a Japanese government meeting about revised labor standards. I’d get four days to translate it into English and $200 for the job. I pumped my fist and agreed to take the work.

The transcript was due on a Monday, a day in which I had a full schedule of classes and wouldn’t be able to get away from school and e-mail the finished job to the company (hotmail doesn’t work on the school computers).

That meant that I would have to finish the job by Monday morning before I went to school, but that was a problem because I was traveling to Kobe for some pro scouting on Saturday and Sunday. The work would have to come with me on the road and take a backseat to my scouting reports.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that I had jumped into the deep end of the pool without my water wings. My electronic dictionary, a faithful companion since 2005, wasn’t cutting it for this job. In addition to taking too much time to punch in all of the words I couldn’t render in beautiful, flowing English, it didn’t help me to distinguish between the many different ways to say “standards,” “management,” “consensus,” and a bunch of other bland business words that I’d always glossed over and regarded as unfortunate consequences of reading about baseball business.

I’d spent about six months fantasizing about the fancy-free lifestyle of an independent translator without imagining the work involved, and here it was in front of my face. Eventually, I found a way to get the minutes into English, and I found a way to cram the translating work into the time surrounding the baseball games, but it was a very tough weekend and I never stopped working until I pressed “Send” at home at midnight on Sunday night.

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I gutted out the school schedule for the next couple days and landed on Wednesday, my day off in the middle of the week, the day where I sneak off into the music room and play the piano for an hour with the soft pedal down, or go into town and run errands so that I can watch the night’s baseball game in peace.

A different translation broker contacted me with a new challenge: an outline of a chemistry experiment using ferrocyanide.

Stupidly, I accepted the job before I was even sure what ferrocyanide was. I still don’t really know what it is. Luckily, milliliters and grams are milliliters and grams in any language and I paid enough attention to guys like Dr. Cron and Mr. O to fake the experiment talk and grind through the chemical gibberish.

Before I knew it, it was the weekend again and time to go out and watch baseball. A stack of e-mails awaited me on Monday, another full day at school, and the translation tsunami had begun to swell.

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To make a boring story short, I accepted every job that came my way and took punches to the gut left and right. I found out how difficult it was to stay focused on repetitive topics like company secrecy, how maddening it was to deal with material that was written in bad Japanese, and how painful it was to squint at 10,000 blurry characters on a computer scan of a copy of a fax.

To be fair, there were some joys mixed in, such as the Shizuoka University Earthquake Preparedness Guide which I did fast enough to earn six figures doing nothing but earthquake preparedness guides all year without once cracking open a dictionary, and a SoftBank Prepaid Phone ad that will actually make it into tourism magazines.

All the while, I was teaching a full schedule and leaving Kochi every single weekend. I began to break in early July, when I stayed up until 3 a.m. with the scan-copy-fax project on a Sunday night after nearly getting barfed on by a drunk fan at a game in Nagoya earlier that day only to turn around the next day and teach five consecutive classes the last of which would find me falling off the raised teacher’s stage in front of the class and laughing uncontrollably about it. If that sentence was hard to understand, well, so was I after several consecutive 18-hour days.

I admitted that maybe I had a problem - a great problem to have, especially in these times, but a problem nonetheless - I was one guy trying to work three jobs.

I added up my winnings from the first four weeks of translating and realized that I had made more than half of my monthly teaching salary while still having to teach and scout baseball. Once my renewed visa started in late July, there was little reason to continue teaching.

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Since reaching the decision to quit teaching, life has gotten much brighter, but certainly not easier. I have little doubt about the immediate future, which is nice, but I also have precious little rest and time. As I did last summer, I’ve spent nearly every day covering baseball in Japan and writing the reports that go along with that. In between games and reports go translating projects and meetings with clients when I happen to be in their cities.

I’m finding out what I’m good at (advertising, commercial websites, infotainment fluff and soft humanities stuff) and what I stink at (chemistry, which seems to keep popping up, economics, cars, and computers). I’m finding my limits and learning how to say “no” every now and then. I’m learning how to conduct myself properly on the phone and write polite e-mails, no small feats in Japanese.

More than ever, I feel like a member of my clan. I’ve put my comfortable lifestyle at risk and am burning to win these small battles and make headway in a new industry. I end up like this sometimes and “keep goofy hours,” as Grandma Mac often said. My father and grandfather did this before me, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this behavior went way farther back.

Of course, there are clouds of uncertainty. In the midst of every long project, I wonder, “Can I really do this?” I turn in jobs where I’ve made some leaps that the end clients may not like, and I’ve been dead wrong in other situations (some brokers are kind enough to share feedback).

However, the feeling I get when a broker has entrusted me with a big job is hard to beat. When I hang up the phone, the crowd is cheering like I’ve just hit a walk-off home run and I’m doing that silly hero’s celebration.

Humphrey Bear does it better than I can at 6:26.

I imagine the feeling will fade once I know more about my abilities and have a better feel for which projects are exciting and which are just work. But for now, I’m smiling and riding the waves that began crashing over my head in June.