Working

So while I've been primarily studying for the past year, I've also been goofing off to do some 'work.'

This has involved everything from writing to visiting a tourist area in the south.

While it has become clear that I will never be a linguistically agile person, what with it taking so long to learn Japanese, I've found that I'm decent enough at dropping in and out of a variety of situations to do a variety of jobs.

I'm coming to the end of my language learning, having spent the last of my saved money on this terms tuition.  With that, my options are basically as follows:

Sponge
Mooch
Work

I don't really have it in me to sponge any more than I already have been.

I don't really know what mooch means.

I guess that leaves work.

So the next question is, where to work?  I still don't have the necessary language qualifications to work full-time at a 'real,' company, so it's probably going to be a part-time job somewhere.  If you will indulge me patronising the reader a little, if you are under 50 or so years old, you might misunderstand the term part-time here.

It used to mean fewer than X hours a week (depending on country, somewhere around 25 hours a week).

Part-time now means a job that pays terribly, has zero benefits (health insurance, pension, etc) and can be any number of hours a week.  To put this in perspective, I was a part-timer while I was teaching, because I was paid for X number of hours despite working much longer.

At this point you're wondering what on earth I'm talking about and why I've written this confusing screed against the current state of employment law around the developed world.

Don't worry about it.

This post is entirely for me, reminding myself why I quit my previous job and am working to improve myself.  Everyone has to write something like from time to time.

I Think I'm About to be Assassinated

So I have an utterly, utterly filthy plastic cup that I've never washed (building up immunity) sitting on my desk.  It's so filthy that no matter what I put into it (usually tea, occasionally watery hot chocolate) it all tastes the same.

One of the English teachers I work with took pity on me and washed it out.  Evidently their cleaning liquids were not up to the task, so instead of giving up and telling me to stop being a bridge troll he took the nuclear option.  He cleaned it with bleach.

The nuclear analogy is perfect for a number of reasons.  Firstly, it worked.  The cup is now white.  Whether it's white because the filth has been whitened, or washed away, we will never know.

Secondly, it made a point about my personal cleanliness habits that I will not soon forget.

Thirdly, the area which has been bleached is no longer fit for consumables.  I can no longer drink from that cup.  IT REEKS OF BLEACH.  No matter how many times I wash it out, it won't stop smelling.  I was only away from that goddamned cup for an hour so it can't have been stewing for more than fifty nine minutes, and yet the poison is ingrained.  There is no way it's ever coming out of that damned cup, never ever, ever.

It's a shame because it took me the best part of four years to buy a cup to drink things at work (I only got it because I needed one for the hospital and it happened to be in my bag when I went to work the next week) and I will never remember to buy another one.

And what else is a cup useful for, other than cup stuff?  The cup has been destroyed.

It's also a shame because he's a really nice guy and I don't think he meant to utterly destroy my personal property - he only meant to slyly tell me that my colleagues think I'm a pig (I don't have the heart to tell him I don't give a rats ass) and that I should clean my stuff.

Anyway, it is said that we should learn something every day.  Today I learned that if you BLEACH a receptacle for FOODSTUFFS (drinkstuffs?) you are substantially reducing the ability of that thing to carry the item(s)/thing(s) it was designed to carry.

P.S.  If you're going to try to murder someone who isn't anosmic, bleach is a terrible choice.

Wow, It Rained

So today was a relatively fun day.  I took a rugby ball into school, and the kids were suddenly transported into an alien world they'd never seen before.  It was fun, but also tinged with some regret that they'll never get to play properly.  I hear that there is a team here, but one team on an island this size, means that exposure is awfully low.

I broke a new personal record for squats at the gym today, and subsequently fell over a plug socket in the floor, prompting everyone to laugh; behind their hands or towels, obviously.  Koreans are generally not as polite as some other countries, but they still stifle a laugh when it's at someone else's expense.  The ways they're rude include barging you out of the way when walking, although this usually results in them on their backside, and shouting at you for no real reason.  They don't shout at each other, so this is presumably an anti-foreigner defence mechanism.

Talking of foreigners, this area is teeming with them.  The shipyards have bought in people from all around the world, and it often feels like there are more foreigners  in this particular part of Goeje, than Koreans.  When you step outside this little bubble however, it's normal (in that it's abnormal, if you catch my drift).

Every time we head past the docks in the morning, my brain explodes as to the size of the lifting machinery they use here.  They don't make the super tankers you see on these 'how do they make something so freakin' huge,' programmes, but the things they do make are pretty big in my world.

You occasionally hear them drop something colossal in the yards, and (bearing in mind they're ten minutes away) you think to yourself someone has crashed their car into a lampost.

In a similar vein, I saw construction workers outside, clambering around scaffolding (with no flooring, just great big squares, created in two dimensions) with no safety harnesses.  They were moving round ala ninja warrior, on the obstacle with two walls but no ceiling and floor - for those who don't know, you have your left hand and left foot pressed against one wall, right hand and foot pressed against another wall.  It was pretty awesome, especially considering they were high enough that a fall would be fatal, no questions asked.  And one was using an electric saw of some kind, while balancing on a single scaffolding pole.

The flip side is that they're hellishly efficient.  The road outside was dug up, down to the underlay (hardcore?  Hardcourt?  I don't know  how you spell it) and resurfaced in two days.  It's roughly 250m long, including all the odd pieces of side-street they've done.

The building outside that's being built gains a storey every week.

I recently got the opportunity to use a Nikon D90, which was tons of fun.  I'm waiting on the owner to send me the pictures, and hopefully I'll be able to upload some on here.  It was pretty handy, and the pictures looked to be of high quality (at least on the viewfinder) so maybe a couple came out  okay.  I was forced to primarily use the automatic modes, which essentially make it like a (frickin' expensive) point and shoot, but I did also manage to take a few snaps with the aperture priority mode, (to make the backgrounds all cool and blurry) only time will tell if they worked out or not.  It also had a pretty cool zoom lense, ranging from quite a strong wide-angle to a low powered telephoto.  I don't know the exact specifications, but it allowed for a varied range of shots without switching lenses, which is cool.

Anyway, we'll see if any came out.

In the meantime; bye.

Teachers Day

So Korea has a teachers day once a year.  Like mothers day, only for teachers.  Some of the students give presents, some give little letters and things of that nature; generally thanking you for your hard work and the fifty-odd detentions you gave them last week.

I've been working for a week, and I got a coffee mug, a percolator (plunger thing to make coffee with?), some chocolates (they didn't last long) and best of all - a pair of socks.  Awesome right?  I've only been there a week and one of the students gave me socks.  I guess I have an advantage  because they don't yet know what a hard-ass I'm going to be.  They pretty much all have tests next week, so I'm glad teacher day came up this week.

Socks aside, I've had three excruciating days in a row now.  Todays morning was terrible, there were dozens of things that went wrong.  The afternoon was okay, however I didn't get out of the office until 6PM, due to lesson planning.  To put this into perspective, school starts at 8.30AM and lessons end at  2.50PM.  Three days in a row.  That's not cool.  The overtime pay is pretty much illegal too, so there's no financial incentive, only the guilt tripping kind.

The gym closes at midnight though, so I managed to get in with plenty of time to spare, which is nice.

Anyway, I'm mega-pooped, so I'm off to bed.  Goodnight.

Flights Home Booked.

So I'm getting home on wednesday the 4th at 2:30PM.  Heathrow Terminal 5.

Sad.

The job plan now is to apply for the JET scheme again, (it's been a year already!) and find something interim in the UK meanwhile.  I'll get a driving license (finally) and see what's up with getting further teaching qualifications.  It may well be that's impossible for monetary or experience based reasons, but who knows.

When that all falls through, I'll go to Korea or China.  I've been putting that off because once you go there, it's at least 2 years of working with no money before you can do anything else, namely come to Japan.  Working here is a definite headstart.

I get to worry about my application to that all over again!  Fun times!  Although to be fair, it only popped into my mind occasionally when I applied before.  Then again I was quite busy so who knows how it'll be this time.  I'm going to set the bar high too; I reached the interview stage before, and expect to do the same this time!