Come On Contract!

This past weekend was rainy, then sunny, then both rainy and sunny at the same time. It's sunny now, at least for the next ten minutes or so.

The Russian language company I had applied to in December contacted me this past week and after a telephone interview they offered me a position and sent me a contract.

The telephone interview was with a British guy and it went very well. I had had one interview before, back in December, with a different company and was completely unprepared for it. Used to an interview in North America, I was prepared to extoll the virtues of my ESL work experience and make a generally good impression with my charming personality.

Instead they quizzed me on grammar and lesson planning and asked me to come up with, on the spot, a lesson plan for presenting the Second Conditional using the Presentation, Practise, and Production method. Okay. Ummm....let's see...

I was really unprepared for this line of questioning and mumbled through a series of dislocated memories of lessons I had given three years before in South Korea. I didn't get that job.

This time around, however, I was prepared and before the guy had the opportunity to ask me for a lesson plan on any random subject I took control and casually brought up a lesson I had delivered on the Second Conditional. Needless to say I had one prepared in paper in front of me. He was quite impressed and the very next day I had an email offering me a job in Moscow.

I accepted, printed off the attached contract and signed it and promptly procrastinated on getting it sent back to him.

After a couple of days I stopped in at Staples Business Depot but the cost of international faxing was $5.99 per page. Seeing as I'm living paycheque to paycheque here in Ottawa I couldn't fax this off and expect to pay rent, but I found a Korean-run internet cafe that scanned it for me and I emailed the scan of the signed contract and my passport to Moscow. The very next day I received an email that read "We must receive a faxed copy of the contract in order to close the job" Crap. Anybody have $60?

Thinking quickly on my feet, I took the revolutionary step of sending him another email with the same scans. Aren't I brilliant?