What She Wrote

Once, not too long ago, in a land far away... I worked
at an Internet cafe. In addition to working in the cafe, I set up and fixed computers, wrote HTML, tutored people on computer use, and managed web sites. So, among other things, I was a webmaster -- that being the (then) most used term for those who set up and managed sites. I wasn't interested in worrying about sexism in language, so I was perfectly happy to call myself a webmaster.

One evening, I was watching a beautiful sunset. At the time, Indonesia's rain forests were on fire (again), which wasn't good for Indonesia and surrounding countries, but did produce some truly glorious sunsets. As I was enjoying the magenta ambiance, an Australian gent came up and asked me if I could design a small web site for him.

I questioned him, and found out that he was in the yacht cruise business. He and a partner were running cruises and wanted to sell on the net. He needed web pages with a form to submit for orders. This looked lucrative. So, I quoted a fee, negotiated a bit, and was hired to do the job. I put up some pages with lovely (albeit extensively retouched) pictures of the yacht, and a form that could be submitted by potential clients for reservation dates and price quotes. Everyone was happy. For a while.

Some weeks later, the Aussie gentleman returned.

His partner in the venture was German, he said, and had decided he wanted German pages online as well as English. "No problem", said I, "if he writes out the German for me". My German is understandable, but limited to simple stuff such as: "if you try that again I'll slap your face off", so I needed the translation. He told me his partner would do the text. That was fine; I told him to just have his partner send it, and I'd put up German pages -- for a fee (more negotiations ensued) . The translation arrived
and I did the pages, with a form in German. The form had the usual buttons at
the bottom -- "Submit" and "Reset" -- for which the partner had sent me no translation. I left them in English.

The "Submit" button was evidently a problem. The next thing I knew, I was faced with a red-faced Aussie, who was trying to explain in polite terms why the term "Submit" was not acceptable in German. Seems the Germans only use it in the "give in/surrender" sense. I never did find out whether the problem was the actual English word, or whatever that word was translated to in German. Evidently "submit" evoked whips, chains, leather and other kinky thoughts. (Either that, or his partner had a very dirty mind and couldn't see anything other than the most interesting meaning.)

I tried to keep a straight face, not very successfully, and changed the "Submit" button on the German form to the German word for "Send". After that, I'm afraid my sense of humour got the better of me. The program I used for the form had a 'sent by' field, which could be changed. From then on, all his forms were sent to him via The Web Mistress. The Aussie chuckled, the German laughed, and I've been a Web Mistress since.

I still can't click a 'submit' button without chuckling.