Careful Who You Work For

In the last couple of days two friends called me offering me the same teaching job. The first friend, Jan, is hard pressed at the moment and sounded harassed when she rang. A man called Dang had asked her for help finding a teacher for a ten day school he was running. The money wasn’t enough to tempt me away from the work I am doing on my computer so I said no. The second friend rang the next day and she had been approached by the same man. When she was talking she said it seemed too little money for a foreign teacher and joked about a higher amount. I thought about my financial position and joked back that if x RMB was offered I would take it. She said she would call the man and bargain with him and I said go ahead. She told me Dang had given our other friend a lot of pressure. Today I asked and discovered the man had walked into Jan’s workplace and, without having met her before, began to pressure her to find a foreign teacher for him. He was really pushy. This sounded my alarm bells and I began to think about whether I wanted to work for a person like that. My other friend Possum sounded a little uneasy after talking to the man today. We knew another foreign teacher Donny had worked for the man. He has gone to another city in

China to work so I called his friend to see if I could find out if there were any problems. The friend knew little but did give me the name of someone who had been a big problem. I called Jan to see if she knew the English name of the guy who wanted me to teach. She didn’t but she did know that Dang had not paid Donny for a while, giving all sorts of stories as excuses until Donny said he was going to leave and then he was paid. I decided not to take the job, even at a reasonable pay. It is common for such people to play tricks at the end of a contract, giving excuses to delay payment and even saying that the parents gave a bad report on the teacher so why should they pay. I had Possum ask him for payment at the end of each day but he refused and that was his last chance to get this foreigner to work for him.

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