Tomorrow came and went, and temperatures have dropped. With renewed energy I burrowed deep into my ever expanding client database. Tunnels through names, corridors through dates, and large dumps of superfluous data outside. Spring cleaning. Following additions to my service package I have renewed my company brochure, and my website too underwent some important changes. Extra information, different illustrations, and of course a giant blooper in my menu that urgently needed fixing. No, the message “This page cannot be displayed” was not your server’s fault. Mea culpa entirely.
So: changes, new information. Relevant to whom, and in what form? Email, letter, with or without business card or brochure? Which potential customers have not been approached for far too long, which colleagues should be informed? Letters must be written, carefully phrased, addresses checked and printed, envelopes neatly filled. And afterwards, important, do not forget: notes made about who has received what and when. Pestering people with the wrong message at the wrong moment is unwise. With almost three hundred business contacts in the database I cannot trust my memory to keep track of that. Therefore it is Ctrl-F, search, copy and enter many, many times over.
The whole project took three days of concentrated work but now, late Friday afternoon, it is finished. Hopefully with good results in the form of new projects and customers. But that is out of my hands now: time to relax. Monday I will start afresh. There is an interesting Danish news paper article on a treasure find in Sweden, in need of a good Dutch translation, and another one about making plastic from pig manure (!) that will interest a former colleague. Never a dull moment in the world of translation.
