These past couple of days I was able to see, once again, how the Chinese handle hiring a lot differently than people do where I come from. Last Friday I happened to be in the Flagship office with Eric (we spend more of our time there now- it’s a lot warmer than home :)) and we passed Zhang Loashi (the head of the Flagship program in Nanjing). She stopped us and asked if I would be interested in a tutoring position that her friend had available. Not sure how much more time and work this would require, I said ‘maybe.’ Well, she took that as a definite yes because 5 minutes later this man called Eric’s cell phone to set up a time to meet.
We were under the impression that this was a position tutoring for his child which is what Zhang Laoshi had told us. A few phone calls later, with Eric trying to squeeze out more details (they don’t seem to think it necessary to offer them otherwise), we find out that this is actually at a school located 40 minutes away where I would be required to work weekends. It finally ended with them realizing that we would only be around another month (we were also under the impression that Zhang Laoshi had told them this). Apparently, they wanted a year contract.
So we made it through without me once again finding myself with a job out of nowhere. And I didn’t have to actually make the trip out there!
Today, though, I found out that one of the college classes I am teaching is ending next week, so maybe an extra job would have actually been nice…
2 comments:
Wow! At least you have a good negotiator with Eric around (someone who speaks the language that is). And they got to reject you this time. Any ideas where y'all will be in a month? By the way, your Christmas package was shipped earlier this week. We love you!
Patrick had a similar experience yesterday, actually. You probably got off lucky though, tutoring people's kids here can seriously be a handful (aka I'm counting the weeks until I'm done!)
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