Radio station TBS needs two people to handle a special English language travel program they’d like to do weekday mornings. They’d need you for about 15 minutes, 8:30 to 8:45am, Monday through Friday. They also need someone for another program, “Seoul Chic,” which will cover health, mass culture, food and entertainment, and would run Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday for 15 minutes sometime between 9:00 and 9:30am. The shows will start Oct 15, so they need people RIGHT AWAY. Renumeration is negotiable. If you’re interested, send your name, background (a resume would be nice) and a contact number to marmotshole@gmail.com by TOMORROW and I’ll put you in touch with the people running the show.
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18 Comments
Are you taking over Daves ESL Cafe by chance?
Boshintang’s comment made me laugh really hard.
Dave Sperling may be a good guy, for all I know, but the regularly-updated photo on his site that shows him to be professional yet relaxed, sensitive and slightly hunky is unintentionally funny.
Anybody met him?
Yeah, I have a couple of times.
He’s professional yet relaxed, sensitive and slightly hunky in an unintentionally funny way.
I’d love to do the show.
Cooking and traveling are, after my wife, the greatest passions in my life.
Re: cooking, just ask anyone who has been to one of my barbecue parties here! My friends keep badgering me about opening a restaurant. I’d love to do the Anthony Bourdain style thing around Micronesia on someones budget.
Sucks, I’ll have to do it on my own.
If I could record the bits earlier, it would be great. I work a lot. I’d expect good (OK) cash for the deal.
I have first hand knowledge of what they are trying to do with this program.
It’s a good concept, but I turned them down because of the money.
Basically, they offered between $40 and $80 for each day of airtime. That sounds good until you factor in that you have to write the script, and do all the research for it as well. I figured it to be between 2-3 hours of work each day (not to mention that they wanted it live each morning).
As well, they said some BS about only paying part this year because of budget concerns, and then the rest sometime next year.
My internal alarms went off with that one and I turned ‘em down.
Again, I think it’s a fine concept… But not for the money they were offering — not for me at least.
I’m clearly in the wrong country for this to be relevant to me, but shouldn’t that be remuneration?
So we got a last minute Must Do It Yesterday situation where a foreigner must do some vaguely undefined duties without support or guidance. The foreign worker must plan and execute the whole entire shindig by him or herself, writing the script and doing the research ahead of time. Probably one day ahead of time. And then there’s already doubt about the pay even though the job hasn’t even started yet.
I’m guessing that the quality of the work will not be questioned or critiqued at all, just having some foreign accent speaking English on the radio is objective achieved. I’m also guessing that the lucky foreign devil will be left out of the loop on anything related to anything at the company and will sometimes show up to work to find out that there’s a holiday that he wasn’t told about.
I wish I wasn’t able to completely and totally predict exactly how this would go down. However, I will bet $100 to the taker of this job that I’m right. Email me a month after you’ve worked at the job at matthew (dot) weigand (golbangee) gmail (dot) com, we’ll have lunch, and then I’ll pay you $100 if I’m wrong.
Another thing.
Isn’t there at least one company in this whole crazy peninsula who has another modus operandi than this? I used to think it was just a hagwan thing when I worked at a hagwan. But now that i have a job where I both work in a relatively large company and contact lots of other companies all day every day I realize that its par for the course here. The day I find a company in this crazy country that plans at least two months ahead is the day I quit my job and camp out in their break room until they give me a job.
#7: Par for the course, indeed. The old cubicle standby, “Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part,” applies almost every day over here.
In addition to Wedge’s comment, there’s one more;
“My problem is also your problem, but your problem is not my problem”
And there’s also this, which is a favorite in any Korean organization;
“We are all in the same boat”
Is a Man Not Entitled to the Sweat of His Own Brow?
“No, says the man in Washington, it belongs to the poor.”
“No, says the man in the Vatican, it belongs to God.”
“No, says the man in Moscow, it belongs to everyone.”
“No, says the man in Korea, it belongs to your coworkers.”
I’ll bite. Do you have to be in Seoul?
#7 Agree with your sentiments and have experienced such first hand in Korea, but no need to shoot down this post without looking at it for what it is worth.
It is not full time or real job, the employer may want someone to do it as a hobby or a bit of fun that could lead to more opportunities in the future, or something to put on the resume.
Most likely the person who takes the job will be getting paid illegally and outside their visa anyway.
From a business point of view, there could hardly be a worse daytime slot. If my assumption is correct that the only radio listeners left in the modern world are people in their cars, then 830 am is precisely when they’re supposed to be arriving at work - which in practice means that the 15 minutes between 830 and 845 is when they’re finishing parking, bolting for the elevator and arriving at their desks.
Audience: drivers of freshly-empty cabs.
Mato made me laugh with this:
“Isn’t there at least one company in this whole crazy peninsula who has another modus operandi than this? I used to think it was just a hagwan thing when I worked at a hagwan. But now that i have a job where I both work in a relatively large company and contact lots of other companies all day every day I realize that its par for the course here.”
I’ve realized it too. Last month the CEO of my company, not my direct boss, comes up and plops an enormous English document on my desk.
CEO - “I need you to proofread this, I told I client we’d proofread it as a bonus (said document has nothing at all to do with our business with the client)
Hugh - “Uh, but… proofreading is not really my job, I’ve got about 5 other projects I’m behind on and…”
CEO - (indulgently, as if addressing a retard) “It’s easy for you, you’re a native speaker. Just get it to me by the end of the day, I’m meeting him (the client) for dinner.”
Hugh - gulp. “Today? This is pretty big. When did he give you this?’
CEO - “Oh, a few weeks ago. Gotta go, thanks!”
——
Apart from this story, hope the job turns out better than it sounds to anyone who takes it.
#14 Hugh, I’ve had similar experiences myself. (Probably most of us here have also had the pleasure.) Why do a really good job over a two or three week period when you can do a mediocre-at-best job with only 12 or 24 hours remaining before the deadline, right? Who needs any additional information to explain the larger context or finer points of a document when all you have to do is make it good English?
And, who cares if the work you’re being given at the last minute is in any way related to the job you’re supposed to be doing?
Kanglish writers are always shocked, too, to find out how much of their writing has to be completely re-written.