Emptybottle.org

Dateline Sydney : A call to Korea this morning by SeokKyung has allayed my fears of having to scramble for gainful employment. The English Department at {deleted} University has assured us that the visa issues have been ironed out and the paperwork will be on its way to us tomorrow. The job is mine, apparently, which takes a huge weight of stress of my shoulders. It's the 16th today, and our tickets are for the 23rd, and as of yesterday I still didn't know if I had a job!

This is one of those things that happens a lot when you're doing business in Korea, and not, as people who've had difficulty dealing with Koreans tend to claim, because Koreans are 'intrinsically disorganized' or anything of the kind. It's something that took me a long while to understand, and still find hard to trust, surrounded here in Sydney as I have been for a few years by lying, prevaricating pricks and prickettes - when a Korean tells you something in good faith, their word is their bond. A verbal agreement can hold more weight than, or even entirely supercede, a written one. When I was told weeks ago, in what seemed like an offhand way, that I had the job, I should have just trusted in that, rather than spinning out into stressmonkeyland. I've been re-trained by my experiences over the last few years at OmniHyperGlobalMegaNet* to never fully trust what is said to me. I look forward to shedding that layer of skin as quickly as possible.

* I reckon I'll refer to my Australian employer as OmniHyperGlobalMegaNet. In this and any rants about the place in the future, any resemblance to companies living or dead is purely a coincidence.