As I mentioned when I was home, the plan is to come home in 2013 and find a techno-job somewhere in the US.  Dallas would be nice, but anywhere in the continental US would be far closer in distance and timezone than I am now.   But coming back to America earlier is an option – under certain circumstances.  What circumstances?

Here’s the deal:  because I have an existing social infrastructure in Dallas, moving there would be far less costly than another city. I could find a place to live while staying with a friend or relative. I could possibly even find a roommate among my friends there. Moving to another city would be an immediate outlay in hotel costs with almost no possibility of finding a roommate (I don’t do random roommates well).  So, I either have to save enough cash to make the move to a new city, or move to Dallas and gradually build (figuratively, not literally) a home.  MyeongHee will still stay here in Korea another year, but if the right job comes along I’m outta here.

That certainly puts a little umph in my get-along.

I had been working at an “After School” in a regular school teaching English.  That’s a school run by a private company that holds classes in the school after the regular classes are finished. Koreans do that. They send their kids to school, and then they send their kids to another bunch of classes. Why they do that is a) either the regular   school sucks and kids need more learning or b) education is very competitive, even for 1st graders and parents aren’t satisfied being anything less than best in the class.  You decide.  I digress.

As I said, I’d been working in an After School program and I lost my job. The private company did a horrible job of managing their money. To fix that, they had to sell new books to the parents more often to make up the shortfall. Rather than wait until the students understood one book before moving to the next level, it was sell a new book and reap the profits. Nevermind that the kids didn’t understand the last book and the new book assumes they learned it already.  So, as you might imagine, when the contract was up for renewal, that company lost out and another “After School” company was brought it.   I wasn’t a big fan of that approach, but I made good money and only worked about 20 hours per week.  Call it the “Golden Handcuffs.”  I didn’t like the job, didn’t like that I could not get my students to utter more than a word or two, much less a full sentence and didn’t like that I felt personally ineffective at teaching. But I got paid well and had lots of time off.

Just before the contract winners were announced, several competitor companies contacted me to come work for them.  I waited, thinking the company I was already at would have schools to send me to.  They didn’t.  And when I went back to the competitors to see if they needed teachers still, I lost out. They’d already filled their needed slots. Oh no! No job! Whatever will I do.

That was on Thursday when the schools all signed new contracts. By Thursday evening, it was clear I had no job as my company lost more contracts than they had teachers for.

So, Friday morning I set out, determined to find a job.  I got a cup of coffee and sat down at my computer and opened up Facebook.  ”Hey! That’s not looking for a job,” you say. “That’s loafing!”  Not here. There’s a rich environment of jobs available for native English speakers such as yours truly and the traffic on facebook is thick with them.  Just in Ulsan we have two facebook groups dedicated to jobs, whether it be part time, full time or just substitute.  A few emails and phone calls and I’m off and running.

By 9:30am I had an interview set up for the early afternoon.  By 11, I had another company job asking for a resume.  Both of those came to fruition and by mid afternoon I had two part-time gigs.  At 8:00pm another company called looking for a part time teacher. I took that one, too.  I went from 0 jobs to 3 in one day.  I’ll be working 16 hours a week (oh, poor me!  the hardship! the agony!) and making more than I was before at 20 hours a week.  It’s going to suck when I come back to America and have to work a full 40 hour week.

And that’s the way things go here. There are just too many jobs and not enough people to fill them. Not always, of course. This week is slightly different since school began yesterday. The Korean school calendar goes from March 2 until February with a summer and winter vacation thrown in.  This week all the schools are gearing up for the new year, so there are a lot of jobs on the table. Still, a fresh job is usually less than a week away in even the biggest of vacation periods.

Throughout the years, you may have read about my life in Korea as sometimes good, sometimes not so good. But this is one thing that makes it really good – I have never worried about finding a job here.  Given the global economy, that’s a rare thing to day.

Check our  UlsanOnline, where  I pimped it off to my fellow teachers in Ulsan. You can also go directly to the android site and see it. Buy it if you like – I’ll gladly take your money – but it’s a teacher specific tool.

At first I didn’t know diddly about about writing mobile phone apps. I could barely spell Android. But after a little research and some programming I’ve finished with it and placed it on Google’s Android Market for sale. Fin did all the artwork on the app and I did all the programming. He’s paid me a nice fee up front and then we’ll split the profits 60/40 of whatever we sell. At $3.99 per copy, we aren’t likely to get rich but we might make a little beer money and gain a little fortune for ourselves. We’re already famous in Ulsan for the website we do – it’s the most popular English site in the city – but now we hope to get a little more traction with the teaching community.

I”m kind of proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish in less than two months. It’s given me the incentive to try and get back into technology when I return home to the USA. In the meantime, I might develop another app or two. Our Ulsan website has a lot of reviews in English of restaurants that otyherwise would be hard to find for those who don’t speak Korean, so I might have a map-based too that shows nearby places to eat with links to the reviews we’ve done. We also have all the bus routes in English on the website and that might becaomse a mobile app as well.

Anyway, enough geekiness. Summer has finally arrived and it’s hot. Nothing like Texas, but hot is still hot.

This weekend I’m going to the Shipbuilding festival on the coast. A small group of friends and I have entered into a contest to build a boat out of recycled material. The prize is $5000 so we’re hoping we can take a little cash back. If not, we’re very likely to have fun trying.

The teaching jobs keep me pretty busy and I make pretty good money doing it. The programming, although won’t pay much (a friend has asked for a custom application for his new teaching position and he’ll pay me $500 for the software) I hope to parlay into experience that will enable me to get back into the software world when I decide to come home. I’ve struggled with what job I might do when I do eventually come back to the USA and I’ve made my mind up that I’ll get back into technology. I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on the website (and even making some decent money on that) that involves some programming and now with the smart phone, the Android app is taking quite a bit of knowledge and experience to make work. For those not technically savvy, Android is the “other” smart phone style and competes heavily with Apple’s iPhone and iPad line of products. The difference is that Android (a Google tool)  is open source, which means lots of phone and tablet manufacturers can use it and anyone can write applications for it.

Anyway, I’ve just been busy. Real busy. Working 10-11 hours a day and programming in between. Seems like a lot, but I haven’t been sleeping well anyway and so I spend lots of late night hours banging on the keyboard.  It’s actually a good thing, as being busy forces me to be efficient and use my time wisely. I had a little too much time before. The only thing I wish I had time for is riding the bike and for that I need daylight and sunshine, which has been in scarce supply anyway.

Hope everyone else is doing well.

I hope you have never seen one of these and never will see one

MyeongHee’s hairshop got updated this week to the 21st century. She rents a small building with an adjacent bathroom. Prior to this week, the bathroom was just a concrete shell over a ceramic-lined hole in the floor. They used to be fairly common when I first came to Korea but more and more the western toilets are the norm. I really abhor these, because they aren’t meant for toilet paper to be flushed down them. That means that if you wipe you booty with tissue, you’re supposed to leave the tissue in the bucket next to the “island.”  So even though they may wrap up some fouled tissue in a wad of clean tissue, there are still little piles of poop sitting in that bucket for days until someone cleans it out. Very clean and tidy. Smells lovely, too.

You have seen these before, I hope

One of MyeongHee’s friends came by the hairshop to chat and then used the bathroom.  For a man, these islands aren’t such a big deal just to do #1  – we can simply unzip and let loose. Women, however, particular if they wear pants, are not so fortunate and must squat with pants all jumbled up.  After doing her business and having had to work the pants issue, she spotted MyeongHee’s landlord and then bitched him out because of the ancient toilet he maintains. Two days later, apparently shamed into action, he remodelled the hairshop’s bathroom with a tile floor and real toilet.

Progress marches inexorably onward.

Now we can comfortably do our business and without the leftovers from the last person sitting in the bucket next to us.

It turns out the thief sold it to a “friend” and the “friend” brought it to OMK Bicycle shop in Ulsan. OMK is one of several bike shops that know me, but these guys do all the mechanical work on my bike and are also my business partners on my other website, Ulsanonline.com.  They have been regular advertisers on the site and regular mechanics for me. It was no surprise they recognized the bike since a) I just had some work done on it last week and b) the seat was still raised high enough to accommodate a 6’1″ dude.  I’m betting the “friend” is the thief himself and unloaded it as quickly (and as far from my house – 5 miles) as he could. The bike shop owners convinced him the police would be looking for such a bike (they weren’t – I didn’t even call them since the thief had a mask and hat) and that it would be foolish to openly ride it around town.  They called me on Wednesday evening and I picked up the bike Thursday.

Honestly, I think it pays to be a white-face among a sea of Asian faces. Lots of Koreans know me because I look so different. But if I see them outside of the normal environment I have come to know them (i.e I see the butcher not at his store but at the park) I don’t always recognize them.  Back home in teh USA I’d be just another forgettable guy whose bike was ganked.

Anyway, as I expected, when I got the bike  the compact air pump was gone, as was the saddle bag with tools and spare tube. The thief also took the speedometer/odometer but he left the sensor on the front wheel so that’s useless.  All minor problems.  I immediately bought a hand-phone case from OMK BIkes (I love those guys) that will let me clip the phone to the handlebars and I can run Endomondo, a GPS-enabled application on the phone that will track my speed, miles, calories – an even better tool than a mere speedometer/odometer.  Now I just need another air pump and tool bag with tools and I’m set for the long rides into the mountains.

The only bad news from all of this is that my bike now lives in the apartment where we really don’t have room for it.  Even chained to the metal handrails on the stairwell outside the apartment offers no protection from a bolt cutter.

And today, Wednesday, is the first night we’ll spend alone, just MyeongHee and I. She’s a little sad without her boy. And I can’t blame her.  Been there, done that. I think her sadness is compounded by the fact that I’ll be leaving shortly , too. On Sunday, I’ll take off to the USA for a month or so and she’ll be alone.

Anyway, I’m too excited to be sad. I’ll be home in less than four days and I simply can’t wait. Hurry Sunday!

Today I was offered a job at UNIST – Ulsan National Science and Technology University – for a position as a technical writing instructor. All that work on novels, websites, and blogs has finally paid off and someone has recognised that I actually know what I’m talking (or writing) about and can most likely teach others to do the same.

It’s crunch time, however, because I haven’t accepted the position yet. All I know so far is that I’ve passed the interviews (strenuous and arduous) and I’ll go up on Thursday morning to try and negotiate a contract. Their website posting for the position advertises the pay as quite a bit less than what I currently make, but they say there’s room to manoeuvre for experience. Since during the interview process they let on they wanted someone with technical experience I know their pickings are slim. As far as I know, I am the only English teacher in this neck of the woods with any sort of technical background. So, I’ve set a number that I want to be paid and it’s higher than their advertised amount. They’ll either pay it or they won’t.

For me, it’s win-win either way.  I’ll either have a nice job in a prestigious up and coming university with 6 weeks of yearly vacation or I’ll be able to come home in less than 2 weeks for a very long, very overdue vacation. I’ll come back here after my vacation and make decent money doing corporate teaching with a varied schedule or part time teaching at two or more private schools. There’s no lack of English teaching positions here for someone with experience and brains.

We’ll see. I know more tomorrow after I meet with the university.

I submitted my presentation yesterday. I decided to do it on proper emailing, a subject most Koreans truly suck at. I took a presentation I’d already done for a company I teach at and prettied it up for a the academic crowd.  Should be fun, as the ones who have emailed me already regarding the position are guilty of most of the egregious errors in spelling, grammar, cultural usage, etc.

Today at my regular school, the director is bringing in another foreigner for the day.  He says he’s not hiring anyone full time to replace me and wants to just have a native English speaker once or twice a week come in. I guess he wants to break them in right while I’m still there. He hasn’t said anything else about it, but I suspect I’ll have someone else shadowing my classes for the day.  I hope it’s someone I already know.

They don’t know yet if the presentation will be on the 15th of February or the 22nd. The next semester starts in March 2, so that’s only 1, maybe two weeks from when I present. And I leave for Texas on March 6th if they don’t hire me.

So, here I sit, contemplating what I’ll present and how I’ll present it and whether I’ll come home in March or wait until June. I’m learning I don’t deal well with periods of uncertainty and I’ve considered even blowing them off just to have the certainty of knowing what will happen in March. Not the right thing to do, but it crossed my mind.

More news later as it happens.