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One of the joys of working for a global company is this occasional challenge of melding two fairly similar product lines, developed over many years, into a unified, comprehensible offering. It's the end of my second week as a freelancer on site and the work is turning out to be pretty interesting. For example, I spent much of today flipping through a German catalog (in PDF form), running selective phrases through Google translate to make sure my guesswork was on target.

Two years of high school German was long ago and far away, but enough has stuck with me to bolster my self confidence into thinking I'll be able to sort this stuff out. Of course, now as I describe the spray angle of the nozzles I'm writing about, I wish we could invoke the far more poetic German terminology, Sprühwinkel. And then there's the dovetail connection used on some of the company's self-aligning nozzles - itself an interesting concept - for which the German is also quite lovely: Schwalbenschwanzverbindung. As Herr Ruokonen, my high school German teacher, used to say, "Auf Deutsche, bitte!"

And at this rate, I can hardly wait for Montag.