unwind...

I grab a minute between a regular working day and my overtime assignment at dinner. It was just as well because although the dinner itself proved fairly harmless, nothing more than small-talk, there was a meeting of over an hour at the bar afterwards where I had to work properly again.

Quite often the brief from the client is to be available in case someone gets stuck, and that sounds pretty informal. However, if a delegate is permanently stuck, then a dinner turns into harder work than the actual day as normally only one interpreter gets booked for evening overtime.

Sometimes in such situations the request is: "Just let me know what it's about. I don't need to hear everything." I respectfully ignore this request as I am not usually expert enough on a company's situation or whatever the subject of the discussion is to trust myself to be able to edit out the redundant bits. Also, I don't have different interpreting quality levels I could use. I either do it well, or I don't do it at all...