The 9 to 5 Life and Me

For one month, I will be living the 9 to 5 office life of a real, grown-up adult-style person.  Let’s see how this goes. 

I have gotten pretty used to setting my own schedule so far in Kenya, so leaving for work at 7 was a bit of a struggle for me the first few days, but I am getting used to it.  At 7:30 every morning I check in at the Rennie House in Braamfontein and head up to the 14^th floor to the HO offices.  This is one of the taller buildings in Braamfontein and the view is amazing.  From my desk I can see the entire Wits University campus and the posh suburbs of Joburg.  It all feels so grown-up and I felt out of place and awkward until the rest of the staff rolled in on my first day.  The staff is largely female, and either young and devastatingly hip or super-hippie.  Lots of drop-crotch pants and flowy colours and shweshwe in the office.  Not to say that everyone isn't super-professional—these people get a LOT accomplished—but the atmosphere is really chill and cool.  Also, there is a fancy cappuccino making machine that I have become quite fond of.

view from my desk

My job during the first week was taking stories from the beginning to the end of the publishing cycle, which has many, many steps and requires a lot of attention to detail.  I love it.  It goes something like thing: collect the final versions of a story in the L1 (first language, mother tongue, home tongue), get the translation into English, Zulu, Afrikaans, or Kiswahili (L2, lingua franca), and create a metadata form with all translations of the story, author/illustrator names, host organization and copyright information, dates, etc.  This is the master page for the story so there is no room for error!  Then I collect all the illustrations, make sure they are high-res, and create a powerpoint layout of the text and images in each language that looks nice.  All this hardcopy information then needs to be loaded onto the organization’s sharepoint so it can be accessed by everyone.  Now the real fun begins!  Publishing!  Did I say fun?  I meant excruciatingly tedious.  I need to upload each image onto our website’s image database and fill in a ton of information for each image—colors used, keywords, type, category, size, book reference, shape, file type, name… it takes a few minutes to do each image, and we are talking hundreds of images for the stories on my roster.  Once all the images are up, I use our story builder app, referencing the layouts on the powerpoint I made, and publish a finalized story!  I have published six so far (38 to go!) and you can check them out if you a tiny bit of investigation online.

I am also checking the 120+ stories in our database to make sure all images are available on the HO sharepoint and online, all metadata are correct, and the story “family trees” of the various language translations are linking properly online.  This is a big task!  I am also presenting on my work at the pilot sites during out year-end wrap up and doing several other tasks, so I am very occupied. 

To cap it all off, when I get home at night I am working on my master’s paper for Heller… I am a busy lady for these few weeks, but it feels pretty good to be truly tired when I lay down at night.