I am having to relax my usual 'rule' against working on the weekend. This Sunday I am going to be delivering a presentation on behalf of a major British education company at one of the city's leading Universities..... at 9am.
Or at least, I was supposed to have been. Around 6.05pm on Friday evening I received a call from my liaison at the University telling me that it had been switched to Sunday afternoon. Friday evening; barely 36 hours ahead of the event; Friday fucking EVENING! I was vividly reminded of why I gave up working for Chinese universities some years ago.
And the girl mentioned this outrageous bombshell of a schedule change oh-so-casually, just in passing: "So, everything's OK for Sunday? You have all the materials? And you know our address? Oh, and did you know it's going to be in the afternoon now? That's all right, isn't it?"
Well, NO - this shortly before the event, it is most definitely not fucking all right. I happened to have arranged another appointment with a private client for Sunday afternoon, and it was not going to be very convenient to reschedule. Gggrrrrrrr.
3 comments:
Ever read the book "1421 - the year China discovered the world" by Gavin Menzies? A load of cock for the most part, but one major truth shines out - which is that the Chinese have, historically, a remarkable knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and imploding upon themselves.
This probably explains the fact that a small, sub-arctic island off the north coast of Europe with a population of less than one percent of that of the entire world has spread its language, culture, mores, traditions, legal system and so forth throughout the entire globe - whereas the Middle Kingdom (which may weigh in at as much as a third of the world's population) has propagated...er...Gunpowder and Chop Suey?
Their bloody silly language (as you have noted many times) really does not help.
Oh, god - 1421! Monstrous crock of the most ludicrous shit. I particularly loved the idea that the genome similarity between Native Americans and East Asians might be down to a handful of Zheng He's sailors having been left behind and shagged their way across the entire continent..... rather than the, you know, quite well established and respectable theory that the population of the Americas migrated there from Asia during the last Ice Age.
Ah, and the amazing similarities in the languages..... such as WyoMING.
Shameless bastard has made a lot of money out of it, though.
Zheng He seems like a pretty fascinating chap, and deserves to have a serious book written about him in English one day. It seems he was probably too busy forging trade links with India, Arabia, and Africa to have ventured cross Pacific..... and then forgotten to tell anyone about it.
Hey, if the bloody useless bastards can 'forget' to tell you that they have shifted your lecture to Sunday evening, then 'forgetting' to tell anyone that they crossed the Pacific is but a small step :-)
Menzies' 'evidence' is highly tendentious and largely (possibly totally) bollocks, but the underlying thesis strikes me as reasonable...the Chinese really do seem to be collectively incapable of running the proverbial whelk-stall.
A bit like the UK nowadays, in fact :-)
Post a Comment