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In my Ottawa life, every Tuesday evening, I take two gym classes back to back—boxing and the pompously named “body sculpt,” which makes me discover muscles I didn’t know I had.
It’s fun. I love it.
But a couple of weeks ago, I ended up cancelling my second class—one of those nights when the first assignment landed in my inbox at 4 p.m., another one arrived while I was on my way to the gym, and a third one popped up right as I was standing in the locker room. All due the following morning, obviously. Welcome to the life of a freelance translator.
Work takes priority over muscles. I headed for the lockers at the end of boxing class.
“Are you leaving? You’re always taking this class!”
I turned around. I was changing into my translator clothes—jeans and a T-shirt—and she was presumably changing into her gym clothes, except first, she was busy taking off her jewelry.
Her look was very polished—the kind of polished that screams office day. Over the past few months, the generous pandemic work-from-home policy had been tightened, scaled back, amended and more or less rescinded in a desperate attempt to have employees single-handedly save downtown Ottawa’s many small businesses and general gloom by their mere on-site hot-desking presence.
If you ask me, nothing can save downtown Ottawa or North American public transit.
“I see you there every week!”
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