Does anybody know where I can find one of those Windows for Dummies books, preferably one in English. Yesterday this nice man knocked on my door and he had a brand new Lenovo computer for my apartment. It has a sleek and stylish flat screen. A pentium 4 processor and the somewhat outdated but maybe more stable windows XP pre-installed for me. Now comes the funny(tragic not haha) part of the story. The previous occupant of my apartment, who was also an American teacher, had payed an outside company to provide his internet service whereas the school provides it free of charge. To access the school's internet you have to have a program installed and a login and password to make it work. Well the guy who installed my computer is not affiliated with the school in any shape or form, so he has no clue why the internet wouldn't work, or and he also spoke no English whatsoever. So the 20 minute conversation I had with the computer installer guy was a waste of my life I will never get back. So i then called Lily to see if she knew what was up, she of course knows nothing about the computers or how the internet works. At this point and time I think I need to explain two things about the Chinese school system that will illuminate why these problems of nobody knowing anything persist. The first is in budgeting and money management. When a certain department at the school, say the foreign affairs department- the department whose job it is is to look after the foreign teachers and help them with whatever they may need and provide for us what our contract stipulates we get namely a computer- gets budgeted a certain amount of money to spend on its responsibilities that money goes to the money manager for that department. That position is not an actual position that could be a secretary, a teacher, and administrator anybody. Now when it comes time to spend that money however the money manager can't spend it, they have to give it to someone else to spend, to prevent graft and corruption. So by the time something is actually bought nobody knows who or what it is for, cause the guy delivering my computer got the order from a guy who heard from a guy who heard from a guy who got it from the budget. The second problem for us, is the position of the waiban. the waiban is a Chinese National emplyed by the school, whose job requires them to basically be the guide, interprator, babysitter of the foreign students. Lily is our unofficial waiban. Because before this year YMC had no waiban, so last year theyre was nobody whose job it was was to specifically help the foreign teachers. So they had to make do with whoever they could find in the Foreign Affairs department to help. So Lily who actually does a good job has only been doing the job for 3 weeks now. Before that she was an economics instructor at the school and has had no waiban experience, but she did take 5 years of englih in college. So our waiban while eager is inexperienced so she doesnt always know the answers to our questions and has to go find out. So back to our story, Lily doesn't know, but the guy who does Stone, is NOT IN THE PROVENCE RIGHT NOW!! Did I also mention that since this computer is brand new, it is preloaded for use by a Chinese person, so the whole thing is in Mandarin. Now I could just go online to the Windows site and download an English language pack for Xp and that should solve the problem, or right i can't get on the internet, SUCK! So I know have one broken computer, ne worthless computer, and one laptop that i play games and watch movies on in my room.
I heard some sad news today. I heard Jim got fired, and that is very sad. Jim was a good friend to me and a better boss to me than I deserved. 207 won't be the same without him.
