Yesterday, the English Department were summoned to the DoS. We are to have local contracts, which are not binding. We have to pay tax here, but the company will bear the loss, and it’s already in our UK contracts that we will be liable for tax on, roughly, £100 per week at about 30%. As part of this process, we’ve been given English translations of our contract, and I see that the translator needs to work on their register – the word “moonlighting” should not find its way into a whole time and attention clause.
And local driving licences are causing a bit of hilarity, too. We were told that it wouldn’t be too difficult to get a licence – you needed to produce your own and your passport, and the admin people here would do the rest. Naturally, if you have the credit-card sized document, you tend to carry it with you, and that’s what we produced. But then FWAP ( Fraggle Without Apparent Portfolio) began to foresee the need to produce the full paper document, which of course few people carry around with them. Of course, the wee plastic one will suffice, and this was just another example of management finding problems rather than solving them.
I think it was KST the other day who referred to management as muppets, and indeed they will be referred to here collectively from hereon in as Fraggle Rock. This might seem a bit unkind, a bit them-and-us, but think of the money that they’re on, and the fact that in recent emails HD managed to refer to “our illusive IT department” (they were hard to find); and to teachers needing “there email addresses”.
