contingencies

This evening I received a wonderfully (because harmlessly) urgent call from the people on the French end of this book project.

For some reason they thought, to their horror, that they had misinformed me about the length of the book and had accidentally requested something much much shorter than they wanted. It was actually quite charming, because they hadn’t misinformed me at all.

Well… the original estimate was just a tiny bit off the mark. It’ll need to be about 5% shorter than I originally thought.

But at least I now understand the French terminology for these things:

signes includes blank spaces

caractères does not include blank spaces

I’m now told that I’m working in signes, not caractères, and that clears up the final remaining ambiguities.

It was a fun call, patched from a mobile phone in the Paris metro to my flat in Cairo by way of the AUC switchboard. And we got cut off once, just as the familiar Paris Metro “doors closing” sound went off in the background.