Lost in Translation

Their website said they were local. Not just local — in my city. They had an office address within a ten-minute tram ride of where I worked, and a phone number with the same state code as mine.

I signed.

The first thing I noticed was the timing of the replies. An email sent at nine in the morning came back after five p.m. Consistently. It took me longer than it should have to understand what that rhythm meant. I kept telling myself they were busy. Busy is something that happens to people who share your clock. This was something else, and I think I knew it before I was willing to say it.

At the beginning, I told them not to pause for my feedback on every segment they presented. They stopped anyway, and waited.

The friction was never dramatic. It was arithmetic. The first deliverable that showed up was three chapters. Then a week later, several more. Eight days after that, more chapters.

I had also told them, when I first signed, that I had no need for their cover art; I had commissioned it from an artist and provided it to them. I received cover art from them that was a makeover of mine. When I questioned it, the response was, "Oh, that's complimentary."

I want to be careful here because none of this happened in a single sentence I could point at. Nobody wrote we are not what we appear to be. There was no announcement, no moment of unmasking — just a slow accumulation of small differences between the company I thought I had hired and the company that was actually answering my emails. That gap is the whole story. It is not one lie. It is a hundred ordinary truths, each of them slightly smaller than what had been promised.

What stays with me is not the cost, which I never asked to have refunded, or the delay, which was survivable. It is the feeling of having been sold a relationship I was never actually in. I thought I had a partner in my own city. I had a vendor in a different day.

The book deserved better attention than that. So did I, though I had stopped keeping score on that part.

What I took from it, in the plainest terms:

Check where the people actually are before you sign, not where the website says they are. Ask for the registered address of the entity you are paying, not the brand name on the homepage. Ask what is included specifically enough that a list can be written, and have it written. Ask for two authors in your own time zone who will speak to the experience. And once it is time to commit, commit small — one service, one milestone, one payment — before handing over a whole project.

None of that is distrust. It is just the difference between reading a description and confirming a fact — which, as it happens, is the same instinct that keeps me editing this series one careful pass at a time.