Thanks, But No Thanks

Monday morning I went into work and had a fax waiting for me on my desk. It was the contract from the job that I interviewed for on Saturday. The contract was a little weird, and I was expecting that because the guy had said that it was a homemade contract based upon other English conversation schools.

One of the clauses that was interesting was that you got ten days of paid vacations a year, but then you are required to take specific times off during the year – New Year’s, Golden Week, etc. Coincidentally, those holidays add up to exactly ten days. In other words, you can’t take time off on your own. If you do take time off, they deduct 3000 yen an hour from your paycheck. Ouch! Also there were a couple of other clauses that sounded weird, and some things didn’t match up with what we talked about during the interview, so I think the contract really pushed me into deciding not to take the job. I thought about it during the day and eventually when I talked with Kuniko after school she supported my decision. Tuesday I’ll give him a call and tell him the bad news.

One really nice thing that happened today was that my only class of the day, an afternoon class, was rescheduled to the morning, so once I finished that I had the rest of the day to relax and study. I had lots of vocabulary to work since I slacked off over the weekend, so that kept me busy during the day.

At school we have the student teachers for a couple of weeks, and they all introduced themselves today. They seem like a pretty good group. The history teacher was already putting the moves on some of the girls in the group, and it probably won’t be long before they are hiding in classrooms to avoid him. No student English teachers this year, so that is too bad. We need some fresh new faces teaching English.

I got home early because of my schedule change, so I put together the ingredients for a salad and had it ready for Kuniko when she arrived home. I received guidebooks for France and Italy in the mail from Amazon, and so I’ll be hard at work figuring those out over the next month or so. It’s going to be an exciting trip.


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