The knife's edge

Before I get into my usual updates about nothing, I must start with a little rant about my recent work experience. (I know I usually do this anyways but this rant is special, I promise)

So, work starts out as any normal Wednesday does, working on some random project while taking intermittent trips to the water fountain for more tea. I then find out at around 3:00pm that I will have a presentation the coming Friday for Walt Disney. Now, I have not heard about this, I have seen not hide nor hair of the report and I don’t even know the content of the project or the NAME of it. The fake apologetic tones coming from the person who relayed this information to me made me even angrier.

“I’m so sorry for the late request, but please understand us.”

“No, I won’t understand you. I don’t want to understand you. I don’t want to come within a trillion miles of the bridge that leads in the direction to coming close to understanding you. Just gimme the damn report and let me at this thing.”

“Okay, we will give it to you as soon as we finish it.”

“When will that be?”

“Umm, I’ll get right back to you.”

I’m sure you can see where this is leading at this point. To make things short, I ended up not getting the report until 4:30pm on Thursday and the presentation was at 9:30am that following day. I had to turn the report into a good report into a presentation and memorize the content. The kicker here is despite the time I spent on the presentation, at 9:27am that Friday morning (read: 3 minutes before the presentation) that they wouldn’t be using my version, but rather one that they had cooked up that morning. I was ready to draw blood.

The one saving grace of this whole debacle was the fact that I already knew the content of the report, possibly better than the report did. It was covering current business opportunities in the English second language system here, something I was apart of for 15 months. This was probably the fact that saved my ass and the asses of the team I helped.

The presentation went very well and I secured a longer term contract with them because of it. As a result I will now be handling everything that comes from them regarding this issue. It felt good to nail something so important with the amount of time I had to prepare for it, but I’m still pissed about the whole thing in general.

An interesting addend to this comes from while I was going to the presentation that Friday morning. First I get up and leave extra early, as is my habit for presentations, so I could have about a 30-40 minute window in case something happens.

Something did happen.

As I was riding the train, an elderly drunken fellow gets on the train in classic red-faced, stumble mode. Unfortunately he wasn’t of the quite drunk-type and obviously had a few words he wanted to say to me. He basically called me “a dirty American bastard” in translation to which I quickly responded with a sharp glare and a “야…말 조심해라 아저씨..” or “Watch your damn mouth old man” which quickly ended the confrontation as he got a little surprised and had obviously arrived at his stop and got off.

After that, the train got packed. I mean PACKED. I eventually got pushed off 3 stops before my stop because of the physics of people pushing into the train and people getting pushed off on the other end. El Nino, Korean train style. So I ended up waiting about 40 minutes for a taxi and arrived a few minutes before the presentation started.

Anyways, that’s my rant. Long as hell, I know, but it feels good to get it all out there.

As far as other things, the PS3 should be here in a day or two so I’m pretty excited. Unfortunately I might not get to play it right away since I have another presentation this week I have been preparing for. I can’t wait until the weekend though so I can officially tear into this thing and see firsthand the potential addictive properties.

I will update more later as it is time to eat lunch.