As you may be able to surmise from the title, this is going to be a post about something that has filled me with sadness since returning to my once beloved home and native land, the veritable plague of corruption, cheating, and outright scamming that has replaced a business culture that I remember being more honest. Oh sure, there has always been all of the above but, correct me if you disagree, they are now the norm and they weren't before. There was a time in Canada when business could be done on a handshake. Now you are a fool to leave yourself so exposed. Trusting people is just opening yourself to a thorough butt pounding. Employers take full advantage of such "weakness" with no governmental or legal reprisals, giving them the conscience-saving feeling of teaching the employee a lesson by just doing what someone else would have done if they had not. I used to attribute this more to Asia but now here in Canada employers are legally screwing employees with no regulation and no loss of sleep. Canada has transformed into Scamada.
I won't rehash my stories about Canada's cable companies. The most expensive and the worst internet in the world I think, not to mention the scammy phone plans and service. My most recent is Chatr which has been very good. Month-to-month so the long term contracts that are easy to get but impossible to cancel don't exist. That's good. But for two months the internet speed I get on my hotspot when I have no wifi like here at Mom's place has gone from the promised 4G to 1980's pixel-by-pixel page building speeds. We're talking NEGATIVE 4G. That's bad. But that's not the scam of the hour.
I'm not going to talk about every phone call I get from telemarketers in either Manila or somewhere in India that Chatr gave me as part of my phone package either. I'm also not going to talk about every Canadian government agency and the website/phone labyrinths they have set up to take you VERY slowly but surely to dead ends. I have talked with representatives from every sector of the CRA, (Canada Revenue Agency) some of them not even Indian or Philipino, who have all either referred me to another department or told me they don't know why over three thousand dollars of my income tax returns for the last 9 years I was overseas has been and is still being withheld. The government of Scamada effectively STOLE over three grand from me! Not the first time either. But that's not what I want to talk about either.
Just bear in mind the line from the first paragraph as you read today: Trusting people (in Scamada) is just opening yourself to a thorough butt pounding.
Okay, bearing that in mind, the scam I want to outline today is ongoing. We may (or may not) hear about it sometime in May I reckon. To be honest I don't know exactly how it will go yet either. What I know is I fell for it for about a week. I thought I had finally found a good job here in Canada that would pay for my transition to Korea. I still need to pay for an apostilled criminal record check, ($300) a plane ticket, ($600-$1200) and expenses during my first month in Korea (June, about $1000). I was contacted by the PISA test administrators in Canada. That stands for Program for International Student Assessment. It's something that I have blogged and written papers about and I hate. They are standardized tests which I believe I have mentioned in this blog as the worst thing to happen to education in the past 100 years or something to that effect. So right off the hop let's establish that I don't like these things. They put massive undue pressure on 14 and 15-year-olds around the world to basically prove their countries' intelligence. Schools are closed, people lose jobs, children are shamed, a LOT of suicides have been attributed to these cursed things!
However... I am in a financial pinch here and I got a call Thursday April 10th from a 1 800 number so I can't call back (red flag number 1) and talked to an Indian gal (sorry but red flag number 2) named Rupaul. She told me that she had found my resume on Indeed (red flag number 3???) and was impressed. She felt I'd be a good candidate to not only be a PISA test administrator but a PRIMARY T/A. She told me that for every test I administered I would receive $250 plus a $40 per diem plus 50 cents per kilometer if it was at a school more than a certain distance away. But as a primary T/A I would also do pre-assessment interviews with the contacts of the schools, usually the principals, and for those I would receive $125 plus the $40 per diem plus kilometers. I would have to do some training which included online study of the T/A manual and participation in a couple of webinars. But that should only take a couple of days and I would be paid $250 per day so $500. She even mentioned that rides and hotels would be covered upon request when necessary.
Needless to say I was interested! I kept saying I didn't want to count my chickens or get my hopes up, but I did. I always do. I'm SO stupid! This sounded too good to be true so for the next few days I kept my eyes open for the catch. There HAD to be one, right?
Over the next few days I completed the onboarding, sent some reference contact information (and they DID call one of them), did an online criminal record check, sent them the one I had recently done myself, and made it to stage 4 successfully. This is the stage where they give you all the training manuals and tests and scripts and papers you will need for the job. This was also the stage where you receive a contract. I got the email yesterday (my birthday, April 14th) and started studying. They said that even if you haven't received the contract to go ahead and start reading the T/A manual and do the testing and the live webinars. Unfortunately there was a webinar today at 9 AM but I couldn't attend it because you are required to use as your ID the name with which you signed your contract plus your PISA T/A I.D. number. Mine is 5746. (Red flag number 4? I see this as a childish attempt to make something unofficial seem official. Like a treehouse password to keep icky girls out)
So I started studying. The first thing that needed to be done was the initial contact with the schools. This needed to be done on or after the first day of PISA procedures April 22nd. During the call you were to set up pre-assessment meetings. Let's say I was able to set up appointments and go to the schools for the pre-assessment visits when we make appointments and arrangements for the actual assessments in about 5 business days. Schools aren't open on weekends and I don't know how many schools I would be assigned, but I'm guessing about half a dozen. It'll take some quick organizing and some double booking but I think it could be done in 5 days which is 5 business days which is really a little over a week. Allowing a day or two for scheduling eventualities, we're finished with April.
*** Actual assessments need to be scheduled a minimum of two weeks AFTER the pre-assessment visits. I am not sure whether this means two BUSINESS weeks for just two weeks but now we're doing assessments in the latter part of week two and week three of May.
I read on. There will be some occasions in which the school requires regular assessments AND "UH" assessments. These are "une heure" assessments for SPED kids which are shorter than the regular 2-hour exams, one hour or une heure. So a good scheduler is going to need to space these tests at least two days apart. Further apart allowing for eventualities like flat tires, sickness, who knows what? Suffice to say there's gonna be a crunch.
I read on. I found the whole process description to be almost unreadable due to its pedantic, detail-oriented nature, I can only imagine how harsh the actual procedure would be. Filling out STF's Student Tracking Forms with all the detailed codes in all the correct boxes. For example O for absent. Oa for temporary remote learner. 1 present. 1a computer problem. 1b hardware problem (I don't see how this is different from 1a so it could easily cause discrepancy... red flag 5). 1c internet issue. 1d absent >10 min. 1e might have skipped several questions. 2 parental refusal. 3. lack of accommodation for SEN (special educational needs. 4. changed school. 5. enrollment unknown. 6. permanently online studies.
We need to go over all of these we can verify with the principal or contact in the pre-assessment visit and compare with any other T/A to be sure they are all identical. THEN we need to take attendance before the first part of the test, the second part, and before the questionnaire part. This is excluding the pure unadulterated tedium of inputting all this info on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and submitting them to CMEC the Council of Ministers of Education Canada. There they are scrupulously pored over and who knows how long this could take? I'm only boring you with part of the procedure so that you will know that with the time crunch, with the superfluity of data that needs to be recorded by multiple people, there are bound to be discrepancies. Only an idiot would expect all of this (plus the stuff I haven't told you about) to go off without a hitch. That's why red flag number 6 is important. "If there are any discrepancies, CMEC will not be able to remunerate the test administrators."
However, I am used to exacting expectations from uploading grades in Korea to crappy university portals using antiquated hardware and software. I still figured I'd be able to pull this off. Then I read red flag number 7. No pay will be received by the T/A until the completion of his/her first assessment, the submission of all the forms, and the receipt, verification, and approval of said forms by CMEC. How long that will take... well there's no tellin'.
I need the money for my job in Korea that starts June 1 but with all the submission, re-submission, editing, double, triple, quadruple-checking that is GOING to be necessary, it could be July before I see a dollar from these scamsters! To make things even more stressful (red flag #8) there will be make-up assessments if there is deemed to have been less than 85% participation during the original assessment. I think there can actually be TWO make-up assessments (I'm assuming with different test questions) but there will not be a third. This means, again I'm assuming, there will be no payment for the T/A. It's possible that THREE assessments could be done FOR FREE!
Think back to the phrase I told you to bear in mind. Trusting people in Scamada is just opening yourself up to a butt pounding. We've now established that I wouldn't be receiving any money for all the work I'd be doing until at least the third week of May. Allowing for discrepancies, make-up assessments, eventualities, scheduling mix-ups, (and you'd be an idiot NOT to allow for these things) AND assuming CMEC will take the requisite governmental time, whatever that is up to now, AND considering the sheer volume of PISA documents they'll have to process from every province in the country AND taking into account the time it takes to get bank account numbers, set up direct deposit, submit tax forms and other information to the employer, NObody's getting paid till June by these scammers. BUT how much money will the T/A's spend traveling all over the country staying in hotels, HOPING, or maybe I should say TRUSTING that CMEC will pay them what they say they're going to be paid?
This was enough to change my excitement to the familiar depths of Scamada job market despair, but wait, there's more! There always seems to be, doesn't there?
I got the contract. WHILE typing this! Oh it's a beauty! The very first thing it says is that my contract is NOT with the council of ministers of education of Canada but the CORPORATION of the council of ministers of education of Canada. CMEC is not a government ministry as the title obviously wants people to assume, it's a corporation. Not only is it a corporation, it's a fucking LOBBY! Their job is to get money from the government. That's it. And I've said it before many times, the government has no money. This is taxpayer money. They work in cahoots with Stats Canada who have lost all credibility with me. Just check their laughable statistics on immigration and you'll know what I mean. Red flag number... what are we at now 9? 10?
I read on. As a private contractor you are not an employee of the corporation and are therefore not covered by the Employment Standards Act, Workplace Safety Act, Canada Labour Code or other such laws. So I guess if I have a car accident while driving to an assessment I'm on my own. There are minimum standards that employers are NOT allowed to contract out of in Canada but maybe for private contractors it's different? I dunno. Too scummy for me at any rate. Red flag number 11.
I have to agree to indemnify the corporation against any claims by CRA or any other agency or entity with respect to withholdings they make of any kind. So if they can't find a discrepancy, they can make one up and not pay me for an assessment or WITHHOLD my pay and I have agreed to that by signing the contract. Red flag number 12.
30 days notice required to quit a 40-day contract. They are required to give only 14 days notice to fire you. They have 100% assignment rights, I have 0%. Intellectual property waiver so I can't write anything like this after signing the contract. And there is the expected secrecy promise. This requires a new paragraph at least.
As calculated, if I or any other T/A make a visit to a school on the second day of work, April 23rd and set up an assessment exactly 2 weeks from then, which would be the earliest possible date, May 7th could be an assessment date. This is unlikely, but during the second week of May I expect some kid to bring a phone into the test, take some pics of the questions and upload them for all of Canada to see. We are instructed to take precautions against this but nowadays... good luck. I would suggest metal detectors or even just stickers over the camera lenses of students' phones. But some clever kid will find or MAKE a combo calculator/cam, body cam, pen cam, whatever. What are we gonna do then? Will these tests all be disqualified? Certainly then nobody will get paid!
I'd have to be absolutely hurtin' for a butt pounding to accept this job, wouldn't I? Especially since I'll need a driver and no WAY will I find one who will wait till June to get paid! So I'll be going hundreds of dollars into the hole AND extending an idiotic amount of trust to a frigging corporation of lobbyists if I accept this job.
But they almost hooked me! Fucking Scamada! It's hard NOT to get hooked. This is a pattern I've seen that has transformed Canada into Scamada: You get lobbyists to schmooze money out of the government however they do it. Probably I don't WANT to know how they do it. But that's their job. They don't teach English or administer PISA tests. They need to subcontract. Who gets the contract? The lowest bidder. Who is the lowest bidder? The entity that can figure out how to set something up to fracture a few Canadian laws, sidestep a few of our business ethics, and cleverly cheat desperate workers into accepting jobs that will never be full time (and have benefits) or jobs that have built-in pitfalls like this one where you KNOW you will be doing some work for free. These are the ethics that never used to be part of Canadian business and I think if we're honest with ourselves, we know where they come from. We've adopted business practices that overpopulated countries with insane levels of dog-eat-dog, do-or-die competition have developed. We're not big enough to need these practices and we need to smarten up and stop using them. Turn Scamada back into Canada.
Anyway, watch the news for stories of T/A's who weren't so lucky. Mid to late May this year I'd expect.
So now it's off to Calgary to cut lawns or walk the streets for money till June. You want big bear? I love you long time!
Wish me luck...
