Things That Make Me Angry About My Job

1. There has been a huge debate for the past couple of weeks as to whether or not we would be receiving proper health insurance. Over the past couple of years the health insurance has covered virtually nothing that the teachers needed. By nothing I mean one of the teachers was hit by a taxi and needed emergency medical care that was not covered, and another teacher now continues to have severe problems walking due to severe leg thrombosis (or whatever) that they wouldn't operate on because it wasn't covered. Not acceptable. We received confirmation at a meeting today of what we will be getting. We will be receiving coverage in specified Beijing PUBLIC hospitals ONLY when we are at school. Let me repeat: PUBLIC hospitals, ONLY at school. How does this make any logical sense? Basically if I'm sick I need to be at school, and then leave school. What if I get sick on the weekend? None of my prescriptions are covered, and if I need medical attention like I did in Peru I'm going to have to quit my job and move back home because the insurance is so bad. But the thing that irks me the most is that both in the interview and on my contract it was said that I was to receive 100% medical coverage for everything. Now the same man is reversing his decision.

2. Disorganization. It is to the extreme here. With the massive amount of Chinese population, they need to find jobs for everyone. This means that a job that would normally take only one to complete is filled by five people, so five people are basically doing the same thing all day. This leads, not to increased productivity, but barely veiled chaos and a lack of responsibility for any sole individual. If something goes wrong, nobody claims it was them! Ever! If one of them does, they are fired instantly, since there are so many people floating around that could do the same job.

The point of this? Nothing is ever done completely or fully and there is nobody to turn to when you realize that is the case. Take our visa change, for example. I recently booked my flights to Shanghai (WOO HOO!) with the understanding that I need my passport to fly (as opposed to the train, where you need nothing but your ticket). When we had dropped our passports off at the visa office to be granted our resident visas, we received slips giving us the date that they needed to be picked up: today. Mr. Liu, the man from the school who was in control of this process, told us he would pick them up for us. Okay. We then had to go to the police and register ourselves, as our business visa was expiring soon and we didn't want them to come looking for us. The police gave us a slip saying we needed to reregister once we received our new visas within 24 hours by September 27th: yesterday. Okay.

Monday the 27th. Knowing of the lack of organzation within the structure of the school, I called Jessie, the foreigners' assistant, to make sure Mr. Liu was doing hs job. She told me to call him. I called him and he said, "oh yeah, don't worry, I'm getting them on Thursday," to which I promptly replied, "uhh NO you're NOT, you are getting them on Tuesday." He told me to bring him all of the foreigners return slips, which Jessie had, so I had to call her to bring them to him. She then forgot. I reminded her again an hour later. This morning I called Mr. Liu every hour on the hour to make sure he was going to the immigration office downtown to pick up our passports, which he finally did. He returned them to us at ONE THIRTY PM, when we need to register with the police station before FIVE PM. I had to frantically run around the school trying to find someone to help me or cover my classes as I had to work until 4:20 pm, but of course nobody was available as the entire world literally shuts down for lunch from 11:30-2. I was FURIOUS. Finally we had to solve it ourselves: Emilie and Shannon were able to bring mine to the police station with special permission from their offices. I swear on my LIFE, if I had not called all morning, and ran around like this, I never would have received my passport and would have been thrown in jail for not registering (seriously, thats what they do) and not have been able to fly to Shanghai. AHHH!