April 2005

Hacking the Timeclock

Been a week already since I’ve updated the ole’ blog. I just got back from teaching two of my first classes at Shuang Liu. One was a kinder class and the other was a junior class. Both went well, had no significant problems, and even had a little bit of fun. I have favorite students already. I didn’t think it would happen that fast.

My last class was over at 3pm, but I couldn’t clock out until 6pm. I sat around with Terry, the Chinese teacher there, and Cindy (? I think that’s her name) watching the clock tick. The weather is beautiful today and I wanted to leave, so I fashioned a pair of paper clips into crude lock picking tools. I picked the lock on the timecard machine, adjusted the time forward 2 hours, and stamped my card, showing that I had clocked out at 6:08pm. Terry and Cindy stamped theirs also, and I set it for tomorrow at 8am and stamped Cindys. I think just watching me do that might’ve been one of the craziest things either of them had committed themselves to. I’d like to find a good set of proper lock picking tools, and I imagine that sort of thing wouldn’t be too hard to locate here in China.

Sacha is down in Guanzhou, he met with Coors executives last night. He reported that everything had gone exceptionally well, but he wouldn’t have a final answer on the resolution of the contract until Tuesday. I’m not sure what verdict I’m looking for right now, but I’m not entirely committed to either one. If the contract is signed, I’ll leave Chengdu for three months, travel a lot, and hopefully make a lot of money. If it isn’t, I have more time here which is great, but then I’d have to make the decision on whether or not to quit the teaching job. I don’t think there’s much question in my mind over what I’d rather do when it comes to teaching or DJ’ing around China, but there are minor unanswered logistical obstacles.

No matter what happens, I don’t anticipate any significant problems.

The weather is great and life is fantastic.

Coors Tour?

Exciting new developments. Tenzin is trying to get me on a contract with him and one other DJ to tour around China for three months. It’d be a three-month contract with the pay at 15,000 yuan a month, almost three times what I’m getting now at Wonderland. I leave for Xi’an tomorrow morning at 8am and I still haven’t told them that I won’t be here for three days, but I’ll give them a call when I’m in Xi’an tomorrow. I’m making 4,000 in one weekend when Wonderland pays 6,000 a month, so there’s no way that I can miss this to dance around and sing in front of four year olds. I’m looking forward to checking out Xi’an also, supposedly it’s a beautiful ancient city. Apparently it’s still surrounded by a 30 foot-high wall and is the home of the terracotta soldiers which are famous. I’ll bring my camera and hopefully get more shots in three days in Xi’an than I got in 11 days in Shanghai. I’m going with Tony, who’s a just-trained VJ. He’s an older British guy, looks to be in his late 30’s or so. I met him just a few days ago hanging out with Tenzin at his place. Tenzin is a mid-20’s half American half Tibetan muscle-bound kung fu MC, so he’s naturally drawn to hip hop. His friend Sasha is a late-20’s bearded native of Minneapolis who talks like he’s black. He routinely says shit like “I tol’ that nigga to leave me ‘lone”, and so on. Pretty hard to take any caucasian who speaks like that seriously, but the fact that he’s as old as he is further complicates it. He lives in one of the most luxurious apartments in Chengdu, though. Sascha told me his rent is 5,000 a month, which is fucking astronomically high for this area of China. Apparently he’s financed by managing an import/export company which exports tea and Chinese artifacts and imports high-end large-scale printing machines. Life here is so interesting.