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hypercompetent_assistant: (Working)

I Don't Have Much To Say; There's Nothing In This Name

Sorry To Disappoint Again

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Created on 2015-08-24 09:36:54 (#2437066), never updated

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Name:Ovdotya Yakovlevna Kogai
Birthdate:Dec 14
Location:San Fransokyo, California, United States
Some people are linguistic geniuses. Some have high-pressure situations thrust upon them where learning languages is their only shot at anything approaching future success or happiness. Being Koryo-saram in the Soviet Union and then Uzbekistan was not a situation that lent itself to a happy childhood. All her life, Ovdotya has been consistently the 'other', alone and separated from the majority of the people around her, and she has also been under pressure to do better and do more than whatever she was currently doing. When her family moved to South Korea during her early teens, she went to work on making her translation technology a reality in college, landing a job as a low level producer of new technology for Krei Tech. It was only when her path crossed with Alistair Krei that she had her first stroke of luck: upon hearing that she spoke Korean, the Koryo-saram dialect, Japanese, Russian, Uzbeki and English just for the sake of business and had never taken actual lessons in any of it, just force-fed herself vocabulary and grammar until she got it, he hired her as a personal assistant on the spot. She had managed to program a prototype multilingual voice-recognition translator that worked with all those languages already; that kind of talent meant finally having someone who could make international business deals run smoothly on multiple markets.

The great news is she has been in a constant state of learning languages for so long and has been a workaholic for so long that she continues to absorb more languages into her repertoire, making her ridiculously skilled linguistically. She's great at memorization and thus is a fantastic assistant, able to remember dates, times, coffee orders, exact words and more with virtually no errors. This woman can recite almost anything from memory she has ever heard or read in her entire life. She also has the world's most unbreakable pokerface; when you've spent your whole life being bullied for being an ethnic minority, enduring everything from physical to verbal bullying, being called not Korean enough by other Koreans and not Koryo-saram enough by other Koryo-saram people for your career path, the only way to exist is in a steady state of zero verbal cues of annoyance, perpetual politeness and soft smiles.

The bad news is that she's been a workaholic since she was a little girl trying to make people like her by being good at everything. Perfectionist doesn't really cover it; work blocks out huge swathes of time because she brings her work home with her, still striving to impress people on some unconscious level with her skills. She doesn't know how to unwind. Worse, being in a perpetual state of competition, isolation, and being discriminated against has rendered her friendless, save for her boss, because she spent the time most people learn social skills and how to make connections with her nose in a book and her mouth working over new sounds, trying to get it just right. There's a deeply rooted problem Kogai has, mostly due to her upbringing, that makes her feel disconnected from most people around her, even though she genuinely desires friendship.

Recently, she was diagnosed as autistic, something she is still researching and doesn't understand fully. However, it does bring some relief in that it means she isn't the only one reacting 'wrongly' to so many social cues and situations. Though her life still is absurdly centered around work, she has taken the advice of the psychologist who diagnosed her to be more open to the possibility of trying new things and attempting to engage people in conversations on her own terms, in order to help her cultivate more real connections to people.

Ovdotya Kogai is currently twenty-nine years old, lives in an apartment in uptown San Fransokyo California, enjoys collecting and listening to an eclectic mix of music, and has a Red Footed Tortoise named Nam-gi she loves very much.
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