What, me worry?

Today was supposed to be payday. I was set on buying a new jacket for the coming winter. I told Will I’d buy lunch, then we could go collect our salaries, paid in cash on the 24th of each month, from the foreign affairs office.

We called ahead, just to make sure the money was there. We couldn’t reach our usual rep on his cell, and he wasn’t in his office. I was sitting on my couch, listening to Will’s side of the conversation, when I did, in fact, start to worry. My Chinese remains awful, but I caught the word for money and some questions that sounded less certain than I’d like.

“That’s not acceptable,” Will told the woman on the other end. Now I was really listening.

Where was Ricky, our handler, whose sole job (as far as I can see) is to get us legal and get us paid? Who has our money? The woman on the phone was useless. “Why wasn’t that done yesterday?” Will asked her. Not her job, it seems.

There are three desks in the foreign affairs office. The school has five foreign teachers: one American (me), a Canadian (Will), and three Japanese. And yet no one was capable, today, of going to the bank and getting the 11,800 RMB necessary to pay us. What reason do I have to believe they’ll be able to accomplish this tomorrow?

Fortunately, I saved almost half of last month’s pay. Today’s post was supposed to be a happy one, about how I’d manage to be frugal these past 30 days and sock away some cash for traveling in the Winter. If the money comes tomorrow, that will still be true.

If it doesn’t come, I won’t be teaching.

Epilogue: They did, in fact, have my money the next morning. I caught my foreign affairs handler on the stairs, where he told me he feels “really bad about this,” and “it won’t happen again.” The guy in charge (head master or something) left town without signing the necessary forms to get us paid. Why that wasn’t done before he took off is beyond me, and apparently beyond anyone in the FA office. As Ricky said, “it won’t happen again.” Until, of course, it does.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 at 3:48 am and is filed under the Dalian life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.