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I would love to host a D&D game at my lavish bachelor pad near Itaewan. It seems like a waste to do it by Skype...you need to be in the room to really get the full experience. I am back in the US right now on a biz trip and will be back on Sunday. How about some time next week? I suck as a DM but am hell on wheels as a player.
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Apr 25, 2013 04:30
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Grand Fromage posted:Hahaha. No. I taught writing to Chinese students for a year and a half at my university and nobody gives the slightest poo poo. No, but you still think my prospects of getting a University job is good as long as I do it quickly?
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Apr 25, 2013 04:33
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Dead Man Posting posted:No, but you still think my prospects of getting a University job is good as long as I do it quickly? The MA in English teaching will give you a good advantage. Apply widely and you should be able to find one. Don't limit yourself to just high level schools in Seoul.
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Apr 25, 2013 04:36
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Just get that first uni job anywhere, then after that go after your dream jobs. It's much easier to secure a decent job when already living in Korea.
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Apr 25, 2013 04:53
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Dead Man Posting posted:Another question about teacher attire. I wear suits a lot while teaching but it's more business casual. I assume it's different there since I guess most students wear uniforms and someone said business casual isn't a think in Korea. How do you all dress? Collared shirt, pants, and I usually have a sweater on hand because my "office" is basically in a hallway and can get loving cold. My school's principal is always suited up, VP usually is, VP's hatchet-man usually has a suit-jacket. (I don't know his actual title, but he seems to do the VP's dirty work and doesn't seem to teach. When I asked, my coteacher said "he helps the vice-principal"). The teachers here don't often wear suits, except for one lady music teacher who is always smartly dressed.
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Apr 25, 2013 04:56
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DMP, again, only go for University jobs. There are plenty of "bad" or "horrible" regular jobs here but even the worst Uni gig is still consdiered "good" by comparison. When teaching adults, attire is usually kind of up to the general feel of the place. I say you should wear a suit jacket, black pants and a button up shirt and bring a tie along just in case you get that vibe from your job. At my school I wear a button up, suit jacket and black jeans, but that's more than most teachers wear. I'd say business casual is the norm here for non-hagwon jobs. Your ENG 110 experience is a big benefit, that's about the equivalent of a year's teaching right there.
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Apr 25, 2013 05:26
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nullscan posted:University Library allumni here. That was the best job, chill all day, do some inter-university requests, return books to the stacks, browse Japanese Architecture Journal, read Portal of Evil all day, then lock up. So cake. Hell yeah. I did interlibrary loan, university library too, which basically meant I would go to pull some stuff to scan, take a nap behind the microfilm shelves, read national geographic then pull 3 journals and go back downstairs 2 hours later. We had performance evaluations 3 times a year. Mine were always no making GBS threads you "you are the hardest worker and will go so far in life." What you wear really depends. At my last hagwon I wore shorts and t-shirts, same as the other guy teacher. My director was hard on the women though and got pissed at them for dressing too cute. Here I have to dress more formally. Everything Tao Jones said basically. Right now I'm wearing gray slacks, a nice belt and a long sleeve collared shirt. I usually wear a tie and a cardigan, sweater or sweater vest too, but that's just because I look great in cardigans and sweaters. Too warm for that right now though.
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Apr 25, 2013 07:11
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Why is it that when the subway car just opened (on the way to Seoul) the air/sky was yellow? What the gently caress causes that?
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Apr 25, 2013 07:44
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TreFitty posted:Why is it that when the subway car just opened (on the way to Seoul) the air/sky was yellow? What the gently caress causes that? Yellow dust/pollution blows down from China this time of year.
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Apr 25, 2013 07:52
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Whizbang posted:Yellow dust/pollution blows down from China this time of year.
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Apr 25, 2013 09:03
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Whizbang posted:Yellow dust/pollution blows down from China this time of year. And I want to die.
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Apr 25, 2013 09:12
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TreFitty posted:I've never actually been able to see yellow dust. This time it was a single stop where everything was extremely yellow....strange. Was it in a rural area? On my ride home from work I have to go through a few fields and the sky changes color from everything kicked up by plowing/fertilizing. It's loving murder now since I don't have AC and can block the smells/allergens out but at least it's only for a mile or so.
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Apr 25, 2013 09:47
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nullscan posted:Was it in a rural area? On my ride home from work I have to go through a few fields and the sky changes color from everything kicked up by plowing/fertilizing. Why yes it was....that must be it. Thanks
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Apr 25, 2013 09:56
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I thought I had escaped rain forest room. I was informed today that my room, and all the corner rooms in this complex 'sweat' so they are giving me a dehumidifier. I need to ask them if they are or how they are planning on contributing to the extra cost of electricity. Running a dehumidifier constantly is not a negligible cost. Though I am happy they are giving me one instead of forcing me to buy one. It would just be nice to have better quality construction. Maybe my clothes will dry in less than 4 days now.
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Apr 25, 2013 16:46
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Do you put on oscillating fan on them? I do for mine or they will start to smell like mildew.
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Apr 25, 2013 16:51
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I tend to use the gently caress out of the little dehumidifier boxes. 물먹는 헤마 or whatever. Even in monsoon season my clothes will dry within 24 hours.
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Apr 26, 2013 00:02
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I wore shorts and a t shirt in the summer, jeans and a hoodie in winter. Nobody gave a singular gently caress.
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Apr 26, 2013 00:16
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Headed back to the belly of the beast in September for a "vacation", but rather stay with my buddy for a couple months until my tourist Visa expires. Anyone get any crap from customs for having a one way ticket (I will be jet setting around S.E Asia for the good part of a year after Korea)? Are 90 day Tourist Visas automatic for U.S citizens? I feel that after I spent two years over there teaching it will be harder to get that 90 day pass.
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Apr 26, 2013 00:27
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GZA Genius posted:Headed back to the belly of the beast in September for a "vacation", but rather stay with my buddy for a couple months until my tourist Visa expires. Anyone get any crap from customs for having a one way ticket (I will be jet setting around S.E Asia for the good part of a year after Korea)? Are 90 day Tourist Visas automatic for U.S citizens? I feel that after I spent two years over there teaching it will be harder to get that 90 day pass. It seems to only be the airlines that care about making sure you have an escape ticket, and it's probably only so they can make more money off you. There's no reason you wouldn't automatically get your 90 days.
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Apr 26, 2013 01:12
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DontAskKant posted:Another goon here can talk about efficiency at his non-teaching job if he wants. After bouncing around three companies, I don't think it's a nonsense relativist Confucianist ~~Korean culture~~ thing at all. I think it's just raw, ornery impetus. For whatever reason, the genesis of the system can be traced back to a certain framework, and that framework is eternally self-perpetuating. As a rule, people act how they act within a range according to temperament, oscillate within that range based on some version of the 68–95–99.7 rule according to whim, and are knocked far afield of that range according to collision with something. Usually someone. People can change, rarely well and rarely willingly, but it happens uncommonly enough that it's worth discounting. Most of the time, people are instead just directed. Not in a taking orders sense, but in a flow of currents sense. They're directed according to any one of a million and one cues, feedback mechanisms and collisions. Like a pinball bouncing off obstacles. Eventually the bouncing "sticks" and it becomes habit, and eventually habit becomes office work culture. The way in which feedback is distributed on an individual level is incredibly hosed. It's almost a trope to trot out the story about Korean Air having a lower safety record than the airline of Afghanistan because the mechanics were too afraid to tell the pilots something was wrong, and there are rarely examples that blatant, but the residue of that story still clings. There's no reliable feedback mechanisms, because the priority is not in feedback. Collisions are good. They offer corrections to the way people are directed. But the priority, though not always and not exclusively, tends to be on lubricant above collisions. As an example from last week, the managing partner of the firm, who is actually a relatively stand-up guy and not someone trying to backstab me, for whatever reason got it into his head that I should have someone on my team do more patent translation work instead of outsourcing it and having her do OA comment work like she's been doing. I think he's wrong for a few reasons, but I wouldn't have taken umbrage to the discussion, and let's assume he's right. Instead of saying "hey, do this", he avoided the collision by invoking an attorney's name and saying that the attorney was displeased with a prior outsourced specification by the same company I was going to use, and redirected the patent translation back to the team member. I talked to the attorney, who I'm on good terms with, who immediately made a 0_o face and said he loved the outsourced quality. He didn't know his name was borrowed, without malice, to manufacture a nonsense, hierarchically "safe" reason to change how work was distributed without making it look like he was criticizing how I was distributing it. If I hadn't talked to the attorney on intuition, I probably would've gone to the managing partner and argued about outsourcing quality instead of work distribution, which is a totally different discussion, and he would've gotten offended because, by his lights, he found a perfect way to make a change via a lubricant rather than a collision. It wasn't honest, but it was better than honest. The problem with this approach to hating corrections of direction via collision is like that speech by Steve Jobs. He said the problem with hiring B people instead of A people isn't that the B people are that much worse. Usually they're only a little worse, and much cheaper. The problem is that A people will later only hire A people, while B people will only hire C people because either they need the incompetence to feel good or they need the incompetence to look better by comparison. The problem with hating collisions is not in cost, but in opportunity cost. It's not in the individual instances, in and of themselves. It's systemic. People learn the wrong lessons, and those lessons turn into habits, and those habits perpetuate the system. There's a guy who me and everyone else has been trying to get fired for months. Offloads his work to others when there's no crisis, blames others when there is a crisis. We can't. Because the solution every time this problem gets raised, and the feedback from the powers that be to us and to him, is that the issue is not him. The issue is that there is an issue. Tautological, in a way, but what they really mean is that there's usually lubricant in treating symptoms and collisions in treating the disease, so they treat the symptoms. They tell us to work around him, find a way of quietly distributing the work he offloads, and only hire people who he can get along with (submissive, incompetent workers who quit after 2 weeks or, worse, don't). The symptom is gone, but the disease festers. It's the 80/20 rule in extremis. The most dangerous thing in the world is a little knowledge. Not a lot, but a little. This system teaches people entirely the wrong little lessons on how to survive, and they never progress beyond those little lessons. The guy above acts how he acts, simply because he can. There's no correction. He's a 팀장 now, because he survived long enough by way of those little lessons. And that entire corner of the office is now a bloated swamp. I've said this before, but you can try to be right or you can try to get things done. You almost never get both at the same time. It's unerring the consistency with which the system institutionalizes the predilection for trying to be right. tirinal fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Apr 26, 2013 |
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Apr 26, 2013 01:50
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http://sowhatsnews.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/women-warned-against-practical-jokes-as-25-million-men-try-to-recreate-psys-gentleman-video/ So I was reading this and realized that Psy sexually assaulted a woman in a music video in 2013 and it's apparently all good.  Disheartening. 
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Apr 26, 2013 05:08
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Kant or whoever else cares, here's how the phone thing worked out. My phone stopped connecting to the cell network, I took it to the SK shop and they passed it off to the repair service who returned it a day later and said it was my fault because the "main board was crushed" and repairs would run me 150k. I figured it might be better to just upgrade the phone, so the next day I went back with a Korean friend and asked about it. I wanted to try to get an S4 but they said it couldn't be done so I settled for the S3. I also decided to downgrade my plan because I typically only use cell calls for work and spend a lot of time in wifi. Anyway who cares this is how it worked out (after the SK guy made a few dozen calls) There was basically no problem getting the S3, but they first had to sell (?) my S2. I'm not sure if it's back to the company or whatever, and also I might be misunderstanding. That took a day. I had to sign up for another two years of service. Because my first two years won't expire until August, I have to pay my current rate for another two months, then my plan downgrades, and I spend the remaining time paying the downgraded plan as if I hadn't changed phones. After August I start paying a 5k/month more to account for the price difference in the S2 and S3. There was a 20k fee along the way somewhere, related to changing phones. Some sort of service fee for the store, I think. That's it. It was weird and took a while but I have a new, working phone now. Hopefully you can too!
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Apr 26, 2013 05:12
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She was asking for it Lummox. Duh. You've been back in Canada too long, you forgot how the world works.  Don't worry once you're back to Korea you can stop caring about what those silly "women" think.
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Apr 26, 2013 05:13
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She's fat anyways so who cares.
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Apr 26, 2013 06:03
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THE LUMMOX posted:http://sowhatsnews.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/women-warned-against-practical-jokes-as-25-million-men-try-to-recreate-psys-gentleman-video/ Would you go so far as to say that he isn't acting like a 'gentleman'?  Just got all my paperwork/flight stuff taken care of, so I'll be back at Kookmin in June. Does anyone here have any experience in getting ahold of good protein powder in Seoul? Is it common enough that I can just pick some up at the grocery store or am I going to need to go to some specialty shop? In China I've noticed that its absurdly over-priced (as well as possibly just being powdered fibre-insulation mixed with sucrose) but from what I've seen on the internet it seems generally more common in Korea.
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Apr 26, 2013 06:26
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You're going to have to go online usually unless your gym buys it, but it's pretty readily available. I forgot who first posed it, but speedns.com is a pretty good place to get sick powders for sick pumps. You might need a Korean citizen to set it up though because it won't take my foreigner ID.
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Apr 26, 2013 06:30
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You can always just sniff the fumes of our resident benchologist Dr. Max 'Craig' Gainz, who sweats pure protein
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Apr 26, 2013 07:30
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mass119.co.kr is actually my go to if I can't get someone who can get on base in Seoul to get me connected.
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Apr 26, 2013 08:04
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http://www.koreabang.com/2013/stories/korean-teacher-beats-up-student-then-masturbates-in-hallway.html Ok we need to find this schools NET.
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Apr 26, 2013 22:13
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Speaking of famous people...for a while, I volunteered at an orphanage right next to my house in Hongcheon. I think I went no more than 5 times just to bring some toys and play soccer/basketball with the kids. Last night, while at dinner, my fiancee tells me the following happened: the woman we talked to that ran the place got in to a relationship with some guy and plotted along with one of the kids there (so 3 people: her, her guy, and a kid) to bring a mentally-handicapped (or similar) guy to Jeju and kill him for insurance money. They apparently tried to take out an insurance policy at 9 places and succeeded at either 6 or 3 of them. Their plan was genius: take him to Jeju shortly after taking out a life insurance policy on him, give him lots sleeping pills, then cover his face with a pillow and demand payment. Not suspicious at all. I don't know how the police found out they did it. One of the sickest parts of this story is how they convinced a kid to go along with this (he was like 18 or so). I probably knew the kid, too. My friend taught him in Middle School years ago. Haven't gone looking for an English version of the story online yet....just going by what she told me about it.
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Apr 27, 2013 02:21
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eHerb worked out well for me. Under no circumstances buy the weider protein from Costco. It is atrocious.
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Apr 27, 2013 02:24
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I've used iherb.com before and do so frequently, but there are restrictions to the number of "health supplement" containers you can order. So, for example, a 250 pill bottle=1 container, or 1kg bottle of protein powder =1 container. IIRC, you are allowed 4 containers per order that is shipped to one address. Funnily, toothpaste is considered a health supplement.
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Apr 27, 2013 02:32
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So I have this one student that makes my life difficult. He is super annoying to his classmates, which makes them hate him. They them bully him quietly whenever the opportunity arises. This ranges from attempting to trip him, to shoving him when drinking water in order to spill the water, to purposely giving him terrible scores on group grading. It's a difficult situation because I know this isn't intentional. By the way he flips out or acts a fool, he doesn't believe he's being obnoxious. But the thing is, these outbursts upset his classmates for eating up class time or disrupting their assignments. They lash out at him because they're children and that's how children respond to pent up aggression. The student already has had his class switched, and within 3 weeks the new class is already passed at him. Would it be poor for to seat him at his own table? Everyone else otherwise hates being with him or bandwagon the hate train.
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Apr 27, 2013 03:07
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SolidMumu posted:I've used iherb.com before and do so frequently, but there are restrictions to the number of "health supplement" containers you can order. So, for example, a 250 pill bottle=1 container, or 1kg bottle of protein powder =1 container. IIRC, you are allowed 4 containers per order that is shipped to one address. Funnily, toothpaste is considered a health supplement. That's weird. I just bought tea from iherb that should probably be considered supplements. Ginkgo, kava and valerian/skullcap/other stuff tea and I bought 15 boxes. Customs didn't notice or mind I guess.
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Apr 27, 2013 05:33
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Anyone want a car? My husband decided he wants a Chrysler 300 so we are getting rid of our hoopty. Honestly, it's a rust bucket but it runs like a champ and the air conditioning is awesome. It's a '97 (I think that's the right year) Hyuandai Avante Touring (station wagon). I hate to junk such an awesome car so if someone wants it, that would be sweet. We've had it for five years here in Korea.
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Apr 27, 2013 06:37
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Is it free?
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Apr 27, 2013 07:15
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BrainDance posted:That's weird. I just bought tea from iherb that should probably be considered supplements. Ginkgo, kava and valerian/skullcap/other stuff tea and I bought 15 boxes. Customs didn't notice or mind I guess. Korean Customs  Tea especially given that it is a product that they produce in Korea. Strange, right?
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Apr 27, 2013 07:56
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gingersmurf posted:Anyone want a car? My husband decided he wants a Chrysler 300 so we are getting rid of our hoopty. Honestly, it's a rust bucket but it runs like a champ and the air conditioning is awesome. It's a '97 (I think that's the right year) Hyuandai Avante Touring (station wagon). I hate to junk such an awesome car so if someone wants it, that would be sweet. We've had it for five years here in Korea.
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Apr 27, 2013 07:58
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My husband and I just about decided today that we're finally going to buy one...
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Apr 27, 2013 09:40
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I just saw some ad in the bus meant for little kids where a giant blue lion pisses all over some other cutesy animals then bends back and pisses all over its own face and into its own mouth. What
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Apr 27, 2013 12:59
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