Are We Still Having Fun?

That last one is the back of a girl's t-shirt by the way. I know it kind of looks like a pillow or something, but you can see the bra strap there, sort of.

The Big Fat Sell-Out: English Teacher X Wants YOU!

Okay, I found out that not only do I have the power to hire, my school is so desperate for teachers I will get a bounty for each new one I find.

I figure this is as good a place to start as any.

Anybody interested in signing a nine-month contract to work in Vodkaberg, Russia, starting next September, please drop me a line at englishteacherx@yahoo.com.

Bear in mind that this is a fairly reputable language school with decent working conditions and salary, but it's still a chain language school -- read all the stuff on my TEACHER TIPS section if you're a novice. Drunkards and whoremongers only accepted if you can keep your shit together for morning classes, put up with working in the evenings, etc.

Experience and qualifications preferred but not absolutely necessary, depending on a few things. Salary and such somewhat negotiable.

And yes, I'm a big 37-year-old pussy now, so don't expect me to be a wild animal with a white-board marker. I'm a nice enough guy though.

I'll Rip Your Testicles Off

One of the teachers here recently broke up with his girlfriend; a bit of a bad one for him, it would seem. He's been making a valiant effort to go out and meet a new one, though. He met a girl at the House of Pain nightclub last week and exchanged a few SMS messages with her, agreeing to meet sometime.

Then on Thursday night a 2:30am he received a message reading (translated from Russian) as follows:

Don't send another message or call Elena again, or I'll rip your testicles off. I'm not joking. Her boyfriend, Sergei.

Feeling perhaps that his point had not been clearly made, Sergei then called my colleague the next morning, reiterating his point.

My colleague said, "Yeah, sure, whatever" or something like that and hung up. He was in class with an individual student, a young Russian businessman, at the time.

The young Russian businessman, when my colleague explained the situation, offered to get a couple of guys together and go pay a visit to this Sergei.

My colleague said that wouldn't be necessary.

Sharing this story with us over pizza and beer, our first response was that we should take the number of this Elena, and have every single teacher we know send her romantic messages constantly.

My colleague didn't like the idea though. I felt like an insult of this nature should not be left alone, but, well, they're his testicles, I guess.

Housewives and Kept Women

Another symptom of the increasing yuppie-hipster-globaldoofusization of Vodkaberg are the morning classes. A few years ago, you couldn't get people out of bed before 9:00am with a shotgun. We NEVER had morning classes. Now we are overwhelmed with 9:00am classes.

Composed of housewives.

We've always had a few of those, but now. . . every fucking class, filled with rich housewives. Some of them work in some capacity for their husbands' businesses, I suppose, but mostly they're trying to learn English so that they can better shop and order margaritas while in Cyprus or Dubai or Switzerland on holidays.

They're not all housewives, actually -- some of them are girlfriends of rich guys. Got a couple of those. That's especially puzzling to me -- why should they get up early? -- until I figured out that their rich boyfriends wanted them to study in the morning, so they'd be at home to fuck them stupid in the evening.

I suppose I shouldn't complain that these women want to fill their otherwise pointless lives by studying English.

Really, I shouldn't.

(You might wonder why I, as DOS, should have a morning class -- simple -- so that nobody could come whining to me and say, "But YOU never do morning classes!")

Memento to Forget

Last summer I made a post entitled, "MEAT LOAF, WATERSLIDE, BOOBIES: THE GAME!"

The girl from this post, pictured below, occasionally gets in touch with me, about every three months or so. The last time I saw her was in December, when she wanted me to write out all the answers for her English assignments for her. (For plying my trade, I was rewarded with her coin of the realm -- sex, of course.)



She told me to bring her a keychain from America. What I usually do when people I don't especially like ask me to bring them souvenirs from America is go to the dollar store and buy a bunch of crap -- there's loads of cheap junk with American flags and such on it there.

I can't remember if I couldn't find a keychain, or couldn't find one cheap enough, or what, but I didn't bring her one. She's been recently bugging me to get the keychain, and called last Saturday and wanted to meet to get it. I figured giving her nothing would also get me nothing, if you understand me.

Over the years, I've accumulated a box of gifts that students have given me -- mostly completely useless knick-knacks, including a stuffed monkey, a small statue of a horse, Christmas ornaments, etc. I searched frantically through it for something that looked like it was from America.

Finally I found it -- a candle designed to look like a glass of Jack Daniels whiskey.

I told her that the cat must have run off with her keychain, knocked it under the sofa or something, and gave her the candle designed to look like a glass of Jack Daniels.

She accepted it, but wasn't totally satisfied -- she came to the bar where my cronies and I were drinking and sat for only one beer and then left, telling me to call her when I found the keychain.

My cronies were impressed by the way I'd handled things, but a bit puzzled as to why she hadn't liked the candle so much.

"Much cooler than a keychain," I agreed.

"Maybe she collects keychains," somebody suggested.

I doubt she collect anything other than rich guys and abortions, myself.

Your Strange And Unusual Devices Frighten Me

I got home at about six-thirty this morning, after a fairly brutal night at the nightclub, leading some of the new guys on a monolithic drinking binge. "Russia is killing me," they keep saying.

At about eight this morning, the landlady's son and some workmen came to install my new washing machine.

I was unconscious on the sofa, with my shorts around my knees, after a failed attempt to masturbate, and the covers wrapped around my head. Since I didn't hear the doorbell, he let himself in with his key, and found me just like that.

He was kind enough to close the bedroom door.

It took them about five hours to install it; it involved drilling a hole in the wall and a lot of other noise.

I have no fucking idea how to operate the thing. I've been washing my clothes in the bathtub for the last seven years.

Working My Fingers To The Fucking Bone

Since three out of our seven teachers, all of them the new guys, are down with flu this week, I haven't had much DOS stuff to do. I rearranged the materials cabinet, arranging the books by topics such as "Grammar" and "Reading Materials" and "Communiation Activities" and posted a sign saying "Please return materials to the cabinet after you have finished photocopying them."

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, they say.

Mad Dogs

There's a pack of wild dogs living near the bus stop up the street near my house. Actually of course, they roam around quite a bit, being wild dogs and all.

The dog packs in Bangkok were much more exotic -- they were all diseased and scrofulous, with their brains hanging out, covered with open sores, blind, etc. The Russian wild dogs actually appear to be pretty handsome animals -- retriever-type mutts, generally pretty good sized. GENERALLY, they're pretty well-behaved, as the old women around here toss them scraps of food and bones, etc. And of course they can devour the odd fallen old person or passed-out drunk. GENERALLY, I don't fear them.

But they're big, and they have sharp teeth, and there are a lot of them. And I don't know if it's a seasonal thing -- time to fuck -- or if they all have rabies, or if they're all running out of food, but the bastards are sure getting aggressive. A big one -- it's head reached my waist -- started crazily barking at me today, and then snapped at the back of my coat.

I tried to bark back and assume an alpha male stance, but he didn't buy it. So I threw some snowballs at them and they went into a frenzy, and then ran off.

Of course there's nothing like a local dog catcher or anything.

If this is the last entry -- it was the dogs.

Technical Difficulties

For reasons I don't exactly understand, the last post was deleted. I suppose I must have accidentally deleted it somehow while adding a comment.

Immediately, the vultures descend and accuse me of selling out. Well, fear not, I remain the stalwart, upright voice that I've always been. . . from my 30-hit-a-day soapbox. As if it's even POSSIBLE for me to sell out.

The post was called "Director of Studies II: Back in Training" and I mentioned my week at Head Office training to be Director of Studies. The brunt of it was that I was amazed at how forthright the Powers That Be were about the whole business; we had case studies about drunken teachers and advice about how to deal with homesick whiners and criers. They freely admitted that they don't like hiring experienced teachers, because they usually can't deal with the split shifts and complain more than the fresh-out-of-college crowd.

There was a comment from somebody that they didn't understand why anybody would work for a school when one can work freelance for companies; and here is where I probably accidentally deleted the entry, unfortunately, in posting a response.

My response to the post was that freelance work is usually not as promising as it seems, and linking to an article I wrote on that very subject.

Now leave me alone. I have a terrible fucking hangover.