数えずに引き受けた仕事

One night I got a call from Nakamura, a friend from my university days. It was a request to translate the manual for a machine his company makes into English. "It's simple. How about thirty thousand yen?" I spent two years in Australia, and even at my current company I translate English emails. Because he had looked after me back when we were students, I took it on without even asking how much there was.

At my company the rule is that you submit a notification before doing outside work. I wrote out the formal document and got my section chief's seal. Up to that point it all went along pleasantly. The source text arrived in the middle of the week, and when I counted the pages, there were forty. On the phone Nakamura had said "about twenty pages".

When I had only just taken it on, I thought it would be finished over the two days of a weekend. But I did not know the names of the machine's parts. Because of the technical terms, one page took forty minutes. Twenty-six hours and forty minutes in all. Trying to translate accurately, all that grew was the time spent looking things up in the dictionary. At night my concentration would not hold, and three weekends vanished off the schedule in my diary.

I sent it two days after the agreed date. Nakamura replied at once. "You saved me. I'll pay you an extra ten thousand." He must have thought at first that it was half a day's work. I wrote back honestly: that the volume had been double, and the accurate number of hours. And I turned down the extra ten thousand yen. It was not about the money but about how I felt.

Instead I asked him for one thing: that from now on he settle the page count and the deadline first and send it as a formal commission. Nakamura wrote back, "That suits me better too." Setting a limit, I now accept, is for one's own sake and not for the other person's. What I learned in the three weeks I spent concentrating at that desk was not English but the habit of counting before saying yes.