List of the Month - I'm glad I don't work there any more

Given the rather patchy state of my personal economy at the moment, I should perhaps be avoiding confrontations with employers - even ones with whom I only work very occasionally, and from whom I seldom earn more than 1,000 or 2,000 rmb per month, and often nothing at all.   However, this employer has pissed me off so thoroughly that I am ecstatically relieved to have finally broken free of them.  My association with them goes back almost three years; and it has been misery all the way (nearly all of my 'I hate Work' rants have been about them).   So, by way of consolation and celebration, here are...         10 Reasons I'm Glad To Be Rid Of That Employer     1) The miserable rates of pay (Scarcely better than a bog-standard teaching rate, and less than half what I usually get for comparable presentation work.  Less than a quarter of what I sometimes get!  And the rates have been downgraded slightly in the past year or so - without anyone telling us.)   2)  Constantly being asked to do things at the last minute (This is China all over, of course; but these guys were particularly bad.  I hardly ever got more than a week's notice of an event; typically it was only two or three days' notice.  On at least a couple of occasions, they tried to get me to do something at less than 24 hours' notice - I said NO.)   3)  The amateurish PowerPoint materials they used to provide (Although provided by a British education company, the presentation slides were almost invariably very poorly designed and organised.  And I'd usually have to proofread them to weed out embarrassing glitches of spelling and grammar.  Embedded video and audio clips never, ever worked [and these were often intended to be the basis of activities taking up nearly half of the total presentation!].  Most of the time, I'd use the provided materials just as an outline structure, and improvise 70-80% of the presentation based on my own teaching resources and experiences.)   4)  The total lack of advance information about the events (They never provided a map of how to get to the venue.  Often they didn't provide the address.  Or they did so only in English, which is no help to a taxi driver.  Or they gave the wrong address.  Or the venue was changed at the very last minute.  Or...  Most of the rants I've written about my experiences working for these people have been about struggling to get to an appointment somewhere.  They'd never tell me anything about the partner schools hosting the events either.  Or the size or composition of the expected audience.  Or even, most of the time, the intended purpose of the event!!)   5)  The total lack of concern or awareness about IP (On a number of occasions, I arrived at a venue to discover that video cameras had been set up to film me.  On one occasion, the partner institution had hired a professional film crew for the afternoon, and insisted that this had been OK'ed by the Beijing office of my employer.  [My contact there promptly denied having done so to me; but I'm pretty sure she was lying.  She then lied to the host as well, saying that it was fine with her and it was just me being obstructive.]  I was also frequently asked - expected - to hand over the PowerPoint slides accompanying the presentation.  This stuff might be pretty poor quality, but it still belongs to the British education company employing me, and they have to try to protect its value by limiting its dissemination.  Their Chinese employees simply do not grasp this concept.  I would be willing to bet that they are pretty routinely giving away restricted materials and condoning the filming of complete presentations.  They are quite possibly taking backhanders for doing so as well [I'd almost feel better about it if they were; as I've said a number of times before, I prefer criminality to stupidity].  But I fear they just don't understand the principle at stake, or don't give a toss about it.)   6)  The total lack of concern or awareness about education (I recounted a week or so ago how one of their senior staff recently made a suggestion to me about marketing one of their exams which was staggeringly dim, ignorant, and unethical.  For me, it rather summed up my whole experience of working with them.  They haven't got the first idea what they're doing.)   7)  The preternaturally dim girl who was my main liaison there for the last year-and-a-half (I think, in fact - would like to think, anyway - that she was not nearly as thick as she appeared; but there was a sort of bovine impassivity about her that I found utterly infuriating at times.  Whenever I tried, politely and patiently, to explain why something wasn't right, she'd just nod and smile... and completely ignore me.  As with so many of the other problems I had with other members of the staff there, I suspect it wasn't really a case of her not knowing or not understanding; she just didn't care.)   8) Giving me inadequate or inappropriate materials (As if it wasn't bad enough that the materials were so poor anyway [see point 3) above], they'd often give me materials that just did not fit the audience or the event at all.  For one of the first jobs I did for them - a half-day teacher training seminar down in Shanghai - I found that the materials provided covered barely half of the allocated time, and I was expected to improvise a workshop on 'classroom activities for young learners' to fill the middle section of the morning.  Last month, I was given a rump of a presentation - at most 20 minutes, of introductory material only - for an event slated to last 3 hours, and was asked if I could "pad it out" on the hoof.  Really - I am not kidding.  The final straw came when they gave me a full-length 3-hr presentation [on Presentation Skills, as it happens] promoting one of their Business English exams.... and sent me to give a 1.5-hr class to a bunch of high school kids with it.  That leads me on to my next point....)   9)  Booking me for utterly inappropriate events (These presentations and seminars I was giving are offered free to the host venue on the basis that they are a promotional exercise for the education company and its exams.  The understanding is, therefore, that - with the exception of the teacher training events - these should be run as recruitment exercises for courses leading to one of the company's exams.  In fact, almost every single one of these events that I've done has been delivered to an audience of students already enrolled on a course.... although, in many cases, not a course leading to one of my employer's exams.  And, on a few occasions, I've actually had host institutions request that I excise all the promotional material about my employer from the presentation and just deliver the teaching content.  Yep, my employer's Chinese staff are basically just giving away FREE LESSONS to anyone who asks for them.  Again, one wonders if they're taking backhanders for this, or if they're just doing it because of the subservient Chinese attitude to doing business - that clients must always be sucked up to unquestioningly... even if they're not actually clients!  Either way, I don't suppose the UK head office would be too chuffed to learn about it.)   10)  The lying (The latest convoluted deceptions they've subjected me to about which pay scales are in force are, unfortunately, rather too typical of my interactions with them.  Whenever I confront them with a 'difficult' question or an uncomfortable truth, the response is always obfuscation, misdirection, and lies, lies, lies.)         Sorry, bit of a dull post for those not involved in the education business in China.  But it's good to vent sometimes.  Oh, boy, am I glad to be out of there!