Holiday Hypocrisy

Unemployed again. But it's the best time of year to be unemployed. It's the Christmas/New Years/World Jr. Hockey season. My apartment is cool, I watch football and hockey pretty much every day... I am happy NOT to be writing lessons for practically nothing 8 hours a day like I was last year at this time. I'm thinking of doing something productive with my time. I could study, write, clean, but - nah, I have a better idea: I think I'm gonna grow a white Christmas beard!

To be honest, I haven't been quite that idle. I've thrown myself entirely unwillingly into that hypocrisy we all know as the job market again. It's a(n) hypocrisy we all participate in and actually contribute to. We consciously or subconsciously know it's hypocrisy but we surrender to it. Let me splain. No that would take too long. Let me sum up.

Yesterday I applied to a university called Dongshin University. Again. You see back in Feb of 2011, 8 years ago, I was living in Pyeongtaek  ( I think Anjung to be specific) in my little, traditional Korean house just waiting out the winter applying to universities for the spring semester, which starts in March. Pretty much what I'm doing now. And one of the places I applied to was Dongshin University in a little pear growing town called Naju in the South of South Korea. It's got a big statue of a pear just as you're coming into town and another one just as you're leaving. They grow lots of pears there. You know, the big, juicy, round ones. I don't find them half as tasty as a small, pear shaped Bartlett pear from the tree in my Mom's back yard, but they're treasured over here.

I was (almost) successful in my bid to work at Dongshin in 2011. I nailed the interview and got the contract. Here is a scan of it.

But you know me and my bad luck. The year 2011 was when they stopped allowing criminal record checks from just any police station in Canada to be used for job application in Korea. In their wisdom, the Korean government, or the immigration portion thereof, thought it best to only accept CRC's that originated from the main RCMP office in Ottawa, Canada. That meant that anyone teaching English in Korea from Canada, and there are a LOT of us, had to get one of these:

every time we got a new job here. For me that's almost every year. It's like that for a lot of us. They KNOW that NOW in Ottawa, and you can get one of these in a couple of weeks if you don't mind paying for the faster service and delivery. But back in that first year there was a huge backlog. Mine took 5 months. So I was unable to take the Dongshin job. I got entirely frustrated with Korea and left. The day before I got on the plane home to Canada, I received in my little, traditional Korean mailbox, my criminal record check, which was then useless.

The stamped, verified, or "apostilled" criminal record check, along with

BAM! A stamped, verified or "apostilled" degree and

BING a valid passport, get you

BLAM an alien card so that you are entitled to work in Korea.



So what is the hypocrisy of which I speak? I just told you a good deal of it. Think of what a person has to do in order to get all this documentation and proof of existence. You have to fill out a lot of applications in which you volunteer a lot of information and you have to PAY. We'll get to the PAY  part of the hypocrisy later. Let's talk about the information part. We have to work backwards from the passport. The absolute height of the hypocrisy of which I speak might have been the "guarantor" for my passport. You need a person to vouch for your existence. A reputable person like a doctor, lawyer, clergyman, politician, used car salesman, drug dealer, you know, a reputable person from a well respected line of work, to vouch for you. Failing that (and I failed that) you need a notary public. This is essentially a lawyer who notarizes things. For money. The idea is to get somebody of good moral standing who you have known for some time to give you a character reference. But I didn't know anybody nearby the passport office who fit into any of the categories that were allowable, and I was in a hurry. So I paid a total stranger, a notary public, 50 bucks to sign a document that said this dude's okay. 50 bucks. If anyone ever asks what your character is worth - it's fitty bucks. At least in Canada.

But let's go back even further. One does not just GET a passport, oh no! One must fully commit to a society, a system, a(n) hypocrisy first. What did I need to get my passport? I mean other than flipping a lawyer fifty bucks. I mean the very essentials. You need to fill in the blanks on that passport application. What does one need to do so? Well initially, you're gonna need a name. Sounds silly but you can't get a passport without a name, can you?

If you want to get really Orwellian, read this article about Canadian and American birth certificates. It basically says that what we think of as money is not money. Only heavy and unwieldy gold and silver are actually money. The banknotes we exchange, and now the credit card transactions, are just debt obligation bonds against a gold and silver standard. We think the gold and silver reserves to back up these debt obligation bonds reside in our countries, but our countries have been bankrupt for a long time. Their bankruptcies, or their debt, is owned by the World Bank/IMF. They're the same thing. The World Bank owns Canada and the US.

Interestingly, our birth certificates too are debt obligation bonds, but they're more like stock. We, us people, are the preferred stock of the corporations of Canada and the US. Our birth certificates are registered securities. Stock certificates against which WE are the sureties or the "chattel." We are possessions, livestock if you will, registered at birth (or shortly thereafter) as the property of the world bank as partial payment to them by the corporations that are our countries. Our countries sell us to the World Bank at birth without our parents' (or obviously our) knowledge or permission. We are sources of revenue and taxes for our countries from birth. That revenue we create by consuming, working, doing our social duties like getting married, getting jobs, having families, buying shit, it gets sucked up by our countries and sent off to the World Bank to help pay the interest on the ever increasing debt our countries owe them. It is estimated that if we could cash in these bonds, which we can't, they'd be worth over a million bucks each. My character is only worth 50 bucks, but my existence is worth a million and I don't really OWN either. How's THAT for hypocrisy?

Now the PAY part of acquiring a passport. We need an address. That requires a home. Somebody's paying for that home. You need to outline your entire education. School ain't free either whether you go to a for profit school or a public school, you or your parents pay in money or taxes. You need a phone number, which you pay for. Phone numbers are increasingly important. You can't get a bank account any more in some countries without a phone. And without a bank account, you can't get a job. So we all must PAY the phone companies and the banks. No choice. Cuz we gotta work, right? How else can we afford a home, education and a phone? And we also need two pieces of government issued I.D. Preferably photo I.D. So you need a driver's license. And probably a car.

This is how deeply you have to dive into your county's financial culture before you can even get a passport so you can get OUT of that country and financial culture. So now you're in Korea. You want to work. You need to get the criminal record check cuz they don't know what kind of shenanigans you've been up to in your country before you got here. And the criminal record check done by your countries top police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, don't mean shit either unless you pay a total stranger, that good old lawyer/notary public, fitty bucks to stamp it and say, "Hummph hoaa hrrrr yeah this dude is A O K!"

You also need a degree. You don't need knowledge or skills. You need a piece of paper stamped and/or signed by a university official saying, "Huuumm hooo heerrr haaaa yup, this dude is OK!" But that's not good enough either! You need a total stranger, hello again notary public, to whom you pay another fitty bux, to vouch for the guy who vouched for the document that vouches for your education. My degree is just a voucher I bought. And I am still paying for almost every year.

You also need a medical check cuz nobody knows what kind of medical (mostly sexual) shenanigans you've been up to in your country. So they do blood and urine and physical tests to make sure you don't taint the health purity of Korea. And you pay for this too. A doctor analyzes the results and says, "Hooarr hhrrrmmm hummm yup, this dude is okay." I absolutely KNOW we can't be more than a few years away from a new immigration law in Korea making it necessary to get a lawyer to vouch for the doctor who vouched for your medical test results. They almost have that already. Only medical tests done at certain hospitals by previously vouched for doctors (most likely vouched for by a notary public who doesn't know the doctor at all) are acceptable. But at least we don't (yet) have to pay those notary publics. What a great gig that must be eh? "I'll say you're a good person for 50 bucks. 50 bucks for validation here folks! Get your proof of character right here for the low, low price of fifty dollars!"

So back to Dongshin University. My application package was sent in the morning and I was contacted the very same afternoon. I was pretty sure I'd get a response because not only had I actually been hired before at this school, but part of the job was teaching kids camps during summer and winter break for the Naju City School Board. I had actually done THREE camps with the NCSB, one right AT Dongshin University. I sent pics of one of the camps I did including the director, Mr. Lee and the representative from the NCSB, Mrs. Choi. I sent their phone numbers because they still remember me and will vouch for me. Mr. Lee actually ran for mayor of Naju City last year and I included this pic of him with his number.

Add all this to my 20 years of teaching experience 12 of which has been in universities and colleges and I'm a shoe-in, right? Well the reply was simply, "Do you have your masters degree?" You see it's not the knowledge that's important. After doing this for 20 years, I AM a master! But without a piece of paper signed by somebody at some university stating, "Ho herm hummm hrrr yeah this dude's good," along with a stamp from a total stranger, the notary public, which costs a lot of money plus fifty bucks, well I just can't be trusted can I? So Dongshin will probably hire somebody with nowhere near the skill and experience I have, with a masters in bagpiping or auctioneering and I'll keep looking for work.

Are you seeing the hypocrisy? This is why I will be drinking heavily while watching football, NHL and World Jr. Hockey during this season. If you should happen to get a Facebook message or a text from me that's incomprehensible, go easy on me. The tedium and soul-sucking nature of applying, interviewing and getting all the dox for a new job might just be my least favourite thing to do. Kinda puts a damper on the whole Christmas/New Years/World Jr. Hockey/NFL football season. But I'll try to keep a few sugarplums in my head even if they might have to be the highly fermented kind.