Language barrier (March '07)

As many of you know, I recently began working as a designer for a boutique landscaping firm (yes, there really is such a thing.) My job usually entails going to a rich person's house, looking at their yard, listening while they spout pretentious BS, and then drawing a picture of the yard with changes I would make if I were a silly rich person with no common sense and a desire to spend thousands of bucks on plant material and the like.

Being a small company, there are times when we have to step outside of our job descriptions, and this past week we had a large irrigation project that required me to do just that.

I often relay instructions to our laborers and translate labor concerns for the bosses because I'm the only American (US) on the staff that speaks any Spanish. My Spanish is far from perfect, but it's better than the laborers' English, so on days like we had this past week when I am actually working out in the field with the guys, we mostly just speak Spanish.

This past week we had rented a large and expensive machine to dig ditches for us to save on labor costs. Unfortunately, the machine spent as much time broken down as it did running, so we ended up doing a lot of digging in the mud and rock using hand tools.

After about the third mechanical failure, I turned to one of my co-workers and said "Man, this machine really sucks, huh?" I said this in Spanish.

The rest of the guys started laughing, and he looked at me in a confused way.

Realizing that this might not translate very well, I added hand motions to my comment. "The machine...it sucks, right?" I paused to double check myself. "Yeah...it sucks. It sucks a lot."

Now the guys were rolling. The one I said this to said, in English, "You make joke?"

"No. No joke. The machine sucks."

He looked uncertain, and we all went back to work, with the rest of the guys chuckling, I assumed, at my deprecation of the highly-touted machine.

About an hour later, I had a flashback to introductory Spanish, and I realized what I had actually said, which was not "The machine sucks."

What I had actually said was...

"Hey man, you really suck that machine, huh?"

This was followed by: "You suck it, right? Yeah...you suck it. You suck it hard."

This last, of course, accompanied by hand motions.

My apology was accepted with good humor, but I think they all view me just a little bit differently now...