Spiderman Air Conditioning Repair

It’s been a fairly interesting week.  I tried using a couple of suggestions on uploading pictures, but all of those I tried had a limit of 200 pictures, and want to charge for over that, and, I think I have around 400-500 or so, which may be excessive, but which ones do I delete?  I’ll figure it out sometime this week, probably use flickr or something.

My language school is absolutely fantastic, my teacher is hilarious.  She always teaches me a local phrase (Chinese slang) to use during the weekend, and she has an amazing sense of humour, so, sometimes those phrases are not completely ideal, have to watch when you say them.  The latest one is a way to attempt to get me to think like a Chinese person, and I’m having a lot of trouble with it.  It’s pronounced “Hao Shou Hao Shou”, which literally means “Good hand, good hand”, but the actual meaning of the phrase is completely different and I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around it.  I hope to drive people crazy figuring it out tonight.

Tonight I’m going with Phoebe to go check out her QiPao, and to attempt to get my kindle fixed.  Should be a busy day, actually.

Last week, I had a friend from my former school ask me for help in getting a new job.  The businesses here are run a little differently than I think that they should be run, for the most part.  The Chinese haven’t really learned over time how to run businesses, so they sometimes skip key steps such as learning how to do Marketing, or even training their employees to do their jobs more efficiently.  Instead, they throw them into a position, and tell them to figure it out.  Even the larger companies do this a lot of the time, I’ve talked to a few in some of the larger banks who say that even they provide zero training for employees.  Many companies and corporations also tend to not reward good employees and always punish the bad, so nobody wants to stick their neck out on anything, and good employees tend to want to go elsewhere where their skills are more appreciated.  9 times out of 10 when asking for a raise in China, the answer will be “No”.  I think that part of the problem in China is that they don’t necessarily see employees as a valuable asset, more of an unlimited resource… easily replaced at any given time.  I keep thinking that there is a major opportunity there in the future, if you were to run a company in more of a Canadian or American style, but, chances are that your employees would be a bit confused by the whole thing for a while as well.

I was more than happy to help out my friend, the trick is figuring out how to do it without losing “owed favours”, even if I’m not quite sure why they owe me favours, I still want to wait to utilize that when I really need them, sometime in the future.  I called a friend of mine who works in the finance industry, and thought that I’d just wing it, and hope for the best.  I’ve noticed, lately, that Chinese people don’t seem to have many friends; they don’t really think that they need them many times, but, if they’re forced into a social situation with a possible equal, most of the time, they tend to want to make friends out of those they are meeting with.  We all met at my neighborhood pub (best burgers, hot dogs, and pub food in Shenzhen), and I introduced my two friends to each other.  After about an hour of hanging out and talking, my 2 friends switched to Chinese, and had figured out a job plan for the one to pursue, with a possible job in finance as well.  Apparently, planning to have no plan can be successful as well.

I find that telephone calls of any sort tend to be the bane of my existence.  I attempted to order water today, I had everything planned out, and ended up with a recorded message that I didn’t understand until they said “good bye”.  I kept putting in my customer id number, but that didn’t get me anywhere.  I finally sent them to a friend and asked her to figure it out.  She responded by asking me to send an actual picture of the numbers on my water machine, and that’s when I found out that I had been repeatedly calling the wrong number, one that was actually for a hospital in Guangzhou.  I need to pay more attention to detail.  I’m very happy that I have once again managed to communicate enough in my bank that I was able to pay rent, I’m always surprised by the fact that the only people in this giant international bank who speak English, are the tellers.  This still seems strange to me.

To be fair though, there are still a ton of things here that seem strange to me:

1.       Seeing people ride bicycles with their entire family on the bicycle…a bicycle built for 4… and no, it is not any longer or set up any different than any other bicycle, it just has 4 people on it.

2.      Seeing the little children wander around in squeaky shoes with a butt flap open so that they can go to the bathroom at any given time (do NOT step in puddles in China unless it has just rained and you don’t have any other options open).

3.      Watching “Spiderman” change air conditioners on a 10” ledge on apartment buildings.  There is no safety lines, just some random guy on a ledge attempting to attach a rope to pull the air conditioner in through the window.  I keep expecting to watch them plummet to their deaths. 

4.      Watching employees wash windows on the giant sky scrapers and apartment buildings by sitting on a board attached to a single rope strung down from the top of the building, without any regard for their own safety.

5.      Seeing construction sites where most of the actual work gets done between 10 pm and 8 am, when there’s no safety personal around to make sure someone doesn’t blow themselves up or plummet to their doom due to complete ignorance of safe work practices.

There’s probably a lot more, but those are top on my list today.   This is probably due to the fact that I just watched Spiderman change another air conditioner on the 16^th floor across the street from me.  For the most part, my friends and I just accept these things as “The Chinese Way”, and laugh or gasp or whatever the situation requires, but it still sticks out in my mind.  I sometimes wonder if the other things that I just accept and no longer pay attention to are the things that will cause shock and awe when friends or family eventually visit.

One thing that does constantly cause me entertainment is the Chinese perception of geography.  Every single person who is not Chinese (or Asian) is a Westerner, regardless (irregardless for some of my American readers) of where they are geographically.  Russians are technically north of China, Aussies are south, but, they are all Westerners here!  Additionally, in Guangdong province, everyone not from Guangdong is considered a “Northerner”, regardless of distance or direction.  I think that this actually simplifies things a great deal of time.

I think I mentioned earlier that I have a friend here from Morocco?  She was told by her parents this week that finding a job in Morocco was next to impossible even with a degree, and that she would be far better off planning on staying and working in China.  She was a little disappointed to hear that she would not benefit by going home after her work experience and internship in China, but has decided to make the best of it.  Actually, her attitude and outlook on life is one of the reasons that she is probably my best friend here in China.  She decided that because of her work situation, she now needs to meet more people here and has determined that the best way is to use the expat newsgroups and internet clubs to do so.  I don’t think I have seen such an odd collection of people since she’s started meeting people online.  I was talking to another friend of mine who has been here for 14 years, and he highly recommends complete avoidance of expat sites, networking and meeting friends from current contacts instead of using the internet.  The last guy was very, very strange; he attempted to talk to me, but was extremely socially awkward.