starting work

i've just begun working part-time at the Vrije Universiteit. i'm taking over a grant position that should last for a little more than a year. i'm hoping that if things go well (they seem to be now) that there will be the possibility of finding further funding for me to continue - a good possibility since my supervisor is quite good at finding grant money. what i do officially is work on a database that is looking closely at the Old Testament. my task is to work on the book of Ezekiel, identifying the grammatical function of different parts of the sentence, analyzing clauses and creating structural outlines. if you've been to Calvin Seminary and/or taken Hebrew classes, then what i've just said should sound at least vaguely familiar. and if you own the Bible software, Libronix (formerly Logos), then you might have noticed that there's a little footnote sometimes indicating that the morphology information comes from Vrije Universiteit's Werkgroep Informatica, and that's who i've just joined. and if you didn't study Hebrew or go to Seminary, my description of what i do makes limited sense. so i can describe it as my looking at the Hebrew grammar and how the words are put together to understand better how the words go into sentences and paragraphs. it's not that i'm translating the Bible, what i'm doing is understanding the grammar better (which is needed since the grammar in the whole Bible is not all from the same time period nor all for the same kind of literature - and we still don't know much about the grammar in the (latter) prophetic books) - and that should help people understand the text better, so that pastors and translators can (eventually) access the work that i'm doing and make the obscure-ness of the book of Ezekiel be a bit more understandable. hopefully i'll share insights and questions from the book of Ezekiel as i go along.

but what's it been like? odd. and that's not because i could describe the practical aspect of my work as sitting in front of a computer screen most of the time, looking at letters that make absolutely no sense (some strange transliteration of hebrew), pressing yes a lot and punching in a couple of letters and numbers and making pretty diagrams. i've managed to confuse the computer so often that "fatal error" messages are normal. and thus, i've learned to back up my work in several different ways (and to do so frequently). i think the computer has something against me - this was seen already on the first day, as it refused to accept my change of password - after quite a bit of work, i can now log in but am still using the random password that i received the first day. on the bright side, at least my computer keyboard is clean - my supervisor cleaned it for me the first day :) (the previous user used to smoke a lot).

as far as working at the University, that in itself has had its own glitches. i was asked if i was interested in the grant position already in February. ideally i would have started in March - but i was going to America for 3.5 months so we'd start when i got back. yet, the position, for which i was the only candidate put forward, was not even confirmed until sometime in May! and then when i came in June, it turns out that all of the communication for the transferral of the grant to me was not yet finished. and i had to fill out some paperwork. so i couldn't start until 1 July. and i still got a phone call on my first day of work saying that i didn't actually start work that day! (although i'd been there for a couple of hours already). i ignored the phone call since my supervisor leaves for vacation soon and i would prefer a few weeks having him around while i started instead of being left on my own for 4 weeks almost immediately! there's a bit of flexibility in my hours and how i get paid, so it will work out. at least i have now officially been appointed, as of thursday. maybe i should finally check to see about any kind of dress code - i've been wearing jeans this whole past week :)

and the last odd part is that most of the communication i have in the job is in Dutch. it works pretty well, as i catch most of what's going on most of the time. and my supervisor joked that the percent i do miss can't be all that important, anyways. but i did miss a lot of what was happening in the meeting last Friday - although i understood enough of the dutch to realize that the dutch wasn't so much a problem as that i had no idea what they were referring to - they had these lovely matrixes and codes and i was completely lost. i assume it will get better.

and i assume the adventure of the job will also keep getting better :) after two weeks, it's starting to feel a bit better - at least i'm getting better at fixing my own computer errors..