Putting my stamp on the world

By Richard Peters

For many people, work in this digital 21st century of ours is less about physical toil and more about getting to nonphysical grips with information technology. Working as a translator definitely falls into the second category.

One way we at Klein Wolf Peters try to make our customers’ lives easier is by using whatever IT systems and software packages are already part of their workflow. It’s about finding the simplest and most efficient way of extracting the source copy and inserting its translation into the target language(s). While this means our customers don’t have to integrate any new systems, it does generally involve their setting us up with remote user access to their existing ones, which in turn tends to require additional IT security measures such as multi-factor authentication.

That last paragraph sounds very modern, doesn’t it? I’m bandying terms like “workflow” and “user access” and “authentication” about like some kind of freshly minted information systems project management guru! And when you’re used to cutting confidently through this sea of sophistication, you’d hardly expect to have to reach for the life raft of a centuries-old technology. And yet only recently, as part of a routine security upgrade, one of our customers had to send me a new dongle for their preferred content management software – and suddenly I was caught up in a technological blast from the past that left me reeling.

To confirm receipt of this sleek generator of six-digit passcodes – this unobtrusive yet indispensable enabler of modern information and communication technology, this token of 21^st‑century work, of the heights our society has scaled – the customer (through no fault of their own) was obliged to ask me to sign a missive and then stamp it. Yes, you read right, STAMP, using an actual, physical company stamp, with an ink pad and a satisfying thud and everything!

Now I know that Germany has long had a reputation for revelling in bureaucracy; indeed, in my younger years (shortly after I first moved to Munich), I had a lowly clerical job that required me to painstakingly stamp page upon page of HR documentation before filing it away in giant cabinets in an airless, dingy storage room. But who would have thought that this almost steampunk infatuation with stamping a company’s name and address on bits of paper would endure in this digital day and age?

Even before Covid-19 swept around the world, the long-prophesied paperless office had at last begun to materialise, but the pandemic has given it a tremendous boost. At Klein Wolf Peters, we’ve always worked on laptops that are connected to the cloud, and each year, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I need to print something out. We were early adopters of Microsoft Teams, too, which has become a fixture of many people’s daily lives and a popular way to bridge the gaps between colleagues working across various locations. All this stood our company in good stead when the pandemic began: we were already pretty far along the video conferencing and remote collaboration curve.

Really, it’s the interface between IT and compliance that seems stuck in a bygone age. As a company, we’re committed to upholding the highest standards of data protection. It came as a bit of a shock that to put in place a pillar of data privacy – multi-factor authentication – I essentially needed to step back in time and resort to pen and paper. Perhaps this will change in the years to come. It certainly felt like an anachronism when I signed and stamped that confirmation letter. But then, rather than sending it by snail mail, I took a photo of the signed document and emailed it as a PDF to the agency that provided my dongle – a small victory in the war between paper and purely electronic communications!

And yet, if I consider our company stamp not just as an object in its own right, but also as a symbol, or even the embodiment, of my company, I have to admit that I’m filled with a certain sense of pride. Here is incontrovertible evidence that my little burst of entrepreneurialism, my very own GmbH, truly exists, and that it interacts with other facets of our economy and with people in different walks of life.

So now, whenever I get to brandish that stamp in earnest, be it even for the humblest of administrative chores, I catch a smile tugging at the corners of my mouth because I know it’s a sign that I’ve put my stamp on the world. Klein Wolf Peters, voilà!