Yes, there is more about my boss and the Nice Off. I’ll assume you need some time to call all your friends and jump up and down in excitement.
Okay, and you’re back.
I don’t know if I have mentioned it in the blogosphere that the same boss that forgot my name also has randomly decided to change the dates of our next vacation. She is a peach! This change in vacation means that I have to cancel my trip to Thailand (for which I had been planning for a month) and stay in Korea. I was angry about it, but whatever, I’m just glad she hasn’t somehow instituted a policy that requires us to cut off appendages to sacrifice to our English Academy Deity. (It’s just about that random and crazy here.) So, I heard they were going to cancel vacation so I immediately thought to myself: “Herbert,” I says ( I call myself Herbert), “if they make you cancel your flight they should pay the cancellation fee because this is in NO WAY your fault.” I agreed with myself and left it at that.
Our boss comes down every Wednesday, so I planned on just talking to her when she arrived and settling everything. I didn’t think it would be a big deal. When she got to the school I walked into her office. (I had planned on introducing myself to mock her, but thought better of it.) There really was a need, however, as she greeted me with a “Tedd, right?” She had somehow gotten wind of me wanting money from her to cancel my trip and was visibly not happy to see me. She even went so far as to meet me at the door of her office so I couldn’t walk in and actually sit down. I’ve already mentioned that this boss has no idea how to deal with problems that can’t be solved with a smile. I would even imagine that if she got a flat tire on a freeway she would pull over and just smile at the deflated tire in hopes it would spring to life under the dental luminescence. Well, she met me with a smile and I, of course, smiled back. We talked about my visa and then I brought up the cancellation charge. As soon as I brought it up she nodded and started to walk out of the room. There weren’t many places to go so I cornered her again and asked her directly. I made it clear that the cancellation fee was 50 bucks and I had NO intention of paying it. She brushed me off and said, “She didn’t know about these things” and that she had to talk to my other boss. She said she would email me the next day and let me know.
I, of course was perturbed that she would even resist paying 50 bucks for RUINING my vacation. I also thought it was hilarious how petty it was and how she had tried to run away from me when I asked about the money. I thought it was so funny in fact that I went into the teacher’s room and re-enacted everything for my coworkers. They thought it was pretty hilarious too, but also wondered why a grown woman who manages money wouldn’t be able to sit and talk about money with one of her employees.
The next day my coworker Haley ran into our other boss, Jae. She happened to mention that our female boss a) doesn’t know our names b) asked my name while sitting down to get me to stay longer and c) was really rude to me when I asked about my vacation. Our other boss, who is – trying to think of a euphemism… - managerially challenged actually agreed that the whole thing was kind of bad.
The next evening I received an email from my female boss which reads:
Hi, Tedd
It's me, Your Horrendous Boss*
We decided that we are going to pay the cancellation fee for you flight change.
Please hand out your cancellation receipt to Grace(Shinhye) and she will give you 5o,ooo won in cash.
By the way, sorry about the confusing your name with Chris.
For some reason, I took for you as Chris.
I'm sorry for that.
Have a nice weekend.
See you next week, Tedd
*may have been edited by the blogger
There are two things that made me giggle like a schoolgirl when I read this message:
1) Her emphatic use of my name in the appositive at the end. Tedd, I will remember your name from now on, Tedd. …….Tedd.
2) Our Korean Secretary’s name is ‘Gloria’ not ‘Grace.’
I guess she can’t be expected to get two names right in one email. That would be way too time consuming and absurd. I was tempted to write her an email back and say, “I actually appreciate your lack of respect because I make fun of you to all of my friends and coworkers.” But settled on just going in next week when she comes down to ‘manage’ and giving her a big, stupid smile, Tedd.
The Cheese…
So every week for our classes we let the kids watch a movie clip. They have to listen to the clip and fill out a form full of blanks so they can work on getting appropriate grammar and spelling. Well, this week our movie clip was from the TV Show “The West Wing.” The episode was about this Special Interest Day at the White House when people from any kind of group can come in and talk to the senior staff about their ideas. The Chief of Staff in the show compares this modern day opening of the White House to “the voices of the people” to the Presidency of Andrew Jackson. Jackson was famous for putting a giant block of cheese in the White House so that anyone who was hungry could come in and have some food.
Many of the kids only picked up on the word “cheese” in the movie – so all week I fielded questions about the cheese. Many of which I didn’t know the answer to but gave answers to anyway. The movie says that the block of cheese weighed 2 tons. The clip was enjoyable and I really liked hearing the kids’ reactions. They thought it was funny.
I made it all the way to Friday and then I had one more listening class to show the movie in. I showed the clip and turned on the lights in the room and one of my students was looking at me with the most indignant look I had ever seen.
“Is that Ta-rue?” She yelled from the back of the room.
“What?” I asked.
“Is it ta-rue about the cheeeze?” This girl has like a Korean Valley Girl thing that’s really hard to figure out where it came from.
I had no idea about the size of the cheese, but I had been feigning authority all week, and I didn’t feel like stopping now. “Yeah, it’s true. A big block of cheese. What do you guys think about that?”
“It can’t be ta-rue!” She wailed.
At this point I was losing my teacherly composure (Okay, I have none to begin with, but what little is there was leaving quickly.) She then proceeded to cock her head and then shake it at me like I was some kid who had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
“It can’t be ta-rue. They can’t have-uh cheeeze that beg! That’s a giant cheeeze. Back then the cheese factuhries couldn’t make giant cheeses! They couldn’t a-do et. Two tons of cheeeze. That’s soooo beg! That’s. So. Beg. They couldn’t a-do et.”
She just continued to look at me, sneering. I have to mention that this girl is one of the best students in the class and always tries really hard. I had never heard her raise her voice until this very moment. That on top of that fact that it was a Korean middle school girl with a valley girl accent yelling at me about cheese and you have a recipe for disaster. If you know me, you probably know that at that moment this was the funniest thing I had ever heard in my life. I was laughing out loud.
The girl, we’ll call her the anticheesite, was not amused by me finding her amusing and continued to shake her head at me.
“It’s. Too. Beg.”
Somehow I managed to pull myself together and suggest that maybe the cheese altogether weighed 2 tons and that it was actually many small cheeses. I pulled myself together for about thirty seconds and then handed out the quizzes. The next day I told that story to everyone I knew. It was too great. And too beg.
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