Clickbait Got Me Again!
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Breakfast in the Ruins, Lost Geographies, The Destruction of History
Ohhh… such pointless clickbait, made worse by dependence upon ‘establishment’ interpretations… why on Earth is it that a former culture whose records have been destroyed has of necessity to be considered ‘bizarre’?
Is it because they were not American, and it is normally amateur American commentators who feel the ‘bizarre’ need to demonstrate their craft upon a marshmallow-soft target? Is that what it is? Written also for an audience with the attention span of a goldfish?
LiveScience is a pile of scientistic clickbait and nothing more.
http://www.livescience.com/55430-bizarre-ancient-cultures.html
Captain Scarlet and the Colour Revolutions
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Commentary
What follows probably sounds bizarre, but I have been considering this for a long time since the idea first struck me, and I am increasingly convinced that it is true…
Certain ‘interested parties’ must consider TV to be a gift from the gods. People become addicted to watching some of the most banal and contemptible televisual fodder and will actually complain and suffer withdrawal symptoms if it is taken away (think: “soap operas”, “reality TV”). This means, in fact, that their minds are already entrained to accept a lot of useless mind-control, and of course, those most susceptible to such programming are not just adults with marshmallows or cottage cheese for brains – there are also children to consider.
A child’s mind is much more open to suggestion and influence than that of a (hopefully educated) adult [4], because boundaries between reality and fantasy, fact and fiction, the possible and the impossible have yet to be introduced to them; likewise, compared to an adult with any experience of the world, the actual breadth of knowledge of a child is normally rather limited, at least excepting those cases where the parental influence includes extensive travel. This means that children are more likely to be imaginative in their thinking due to a lack of restrictions, but the corollary of this is that much of what they receive can (when inculcated by the wrong sources) be thoroughly incorrect, but in the absence of any meaningful reality checking (and in the presence of the deliberate filtration of contrary facts) it is impossible for them to know this. One point which seems to tie in well with this is that in the discussion of cults, one theme which crops up constantly is the separation from (or disownment of) past relationships on the part of the neophyte [5], as such influences as family and friends would necessarily lead to the kind of ‘reality checking’ which would scupper the cult leaders’ intentions.
In my own case, this seems to have backfired somewhat, in the sense that the result has been to make me more critical of what I am seeing and to ask myself if any parts of what I see before me are linked in any way. And here is an interesting parallel which, I think now, should have occurred to me much earlier – but it took time to understand and connect the various snippets into a bizarre patchwork. But it seems to be true; see what you think.
As a child, I was a big fan of popular scifi shows – Star Trek, Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Doctor Who (I absolutely adored Jon Pertwee, how nice to have a benevolent alien who travelled through time and space trying to put right everything that was wrong in the universe! And affecting the garb of an Edwardian English gentleman, too), and so on… but the indisputable king of kids’ scifi in the UK was the late Gerry Anderson with his mainly puppet characters – Fireball XL5, Thunderbirds, Stingray, Joe 90 and UFO, to name but a few. And nowadays I look back on these in a somewhat strange light, because they seem to reflect ideas which would later crop up in the conspiracy/alien context.
UFO is rather too obvious in this regard, and it is the slightly earlier Captain Scarlet [1] which piques my interest here. In this story, an exploratory expedition to Mars results in the destruction of the base of the Mysterons, an alien race who actually have the power of ‘retro-metabolism’ (i.e. they have a beam ray with which they can recreate any object which is destroyed). On board the Earth ship is a representative of Earth defence forces, Captain Black of Spectrum (which now turns out to be an interesting name). While the Mysterons narrate their recreation of their destroyed complex and inform the astronauts of their intentions to destroy Earth, Captain Black is visibly taken over by them and in future episodes acts as their ‘agent’ in their fight against Spectrum. It goes without saying that he is a perfect tool for this as he is one of Spectrum’s highest-ranking and most trusted insiders:
(Unfortunately Google won’t let you watch it, but trust me, it’s there… try Dailymotion for a crap, speeded-up version…)
As one might predict from the name, ‘Spectrum’ has a range of ‘agents’ similar to Captain Black, but different ‘colours’. It was at this point that I started recently to ask myself whether there was any significance to this, but we will return to it later. In the meantime, the protagonist, Captain Scarlet, is likewise assassinated by the Mysterons (driving to his destination in a Spectrum car with Captain Brown) and re-created by them, but due to a strange combination of circumstances in the first episode, as a result of a botched attempt to capture the World President (gotta be a hint!), acquires the ability to self-repair, and is therefore deemed ‘indestructible’ (hence the theme song).
‘World President’… what’s that all about? Here is where we come to the heart of the matter. In Anderson’s plots, there is usually some kind of global authority – in Joe 90, for example, there is a ‘World Intelligence Network (WIN)’ with an agent called ‘Uncle Sam’ by little Joe (any old Microsoft users recall why they had to type ‘WIN’ after booting Winblows 3.1?). Likewise, in Captain Scarlet, we have the ‘World Government’ (headed by the predictably white, male ‘World President’… wonder who voted for him?) and Spectrum’s brief is essentially to protect Earth (including the ‘WP’) from attack by the Mysterons. But as our own recent experience shows, most often the real (would-be) ‘World Government’ is intent upon blasting opponents ‘back into the stone age’ (their own words), and the ‘opponents’ are, more often than not, smaller states against whose sovereign rights the egregious, would-be ‘World Government’ is constantly engaging in a bid to take over their governments and make them obedient slaves, all the better to suck the financial and material resources out of their nation.
This is what Captain Scarlet is really all about – and curiously enough, it has a whole ‘spectrum’ of ‘colour agents’ to engage the ‘enemy’. But let’s take a step back and look at this again: we have a would-be world power with an agency whose active participants have colours (and their leader is Colonel White, for goodness sake), all fighting against an enemy whose principal agent on our own planet is Captain Black, and the actual targets of Mysteron aggression are, usually, of an economic or military nature.
And now we are starting to understand, perhaps, where Anderson was coming from: resisting a dark intruder from another planet (the ‘third world’) with whom they are competing for resources, and resisting them with ‘colour agents’… but who uses colour agents??? Let’s take a look…
The term ‘Colour Revolutions’ has been used to describe pseudo-revolutions used to take over sovereign states from the inside, using mainly representatives of their own people, for the benefit mainly of foreign banks and businesses [2]. Usually there is some kind of grievance relating to the election (or re-election) of a national leader, disruption occurs throughout the country and one or more attempts are made to replace the elected leader with one who is favoured by some outside interest which intends to control and impoverish the country. However, these ‘revolutions’ or mob uprisings are not always known by a colour (for example, the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, which led to the downfall of Muammar Quaddaffi, among others). They are all means by which Western capitalists seek to subdue and parasitise other nations. If you want to see how ‘successful’ these escapades are, look at the present conditions in countries like Libya and Ukraine.
The West uses many of these ‘agents’ against what they seem to portray as a nebulous, amorphous and indistinct dark grouping of opponents. But those opponents, in the real world, are the native inhabitants of the nations they (primarily the Western bankers) intend to subdue, and the ‘amorphous’ way in which they are portrayed is a deliberate attempt to present a range of people with diverse interests and concerns as a single ‘enemy’ which must be ‘conquered’, when we really need to just leave them the fuck alone. It has the satisfying effect of both demonising the opposition and making their actual identities indistinct.
The truth about Captain Scarlet, then, is that the unseen alien menace with its revenant agents actually represents the resistance by indigenous peoples to the machinations, economic parasitism and abuse of the Western powers, who themselves are little more than puppets of the major banks. This ‘unseen’ aspect of the Mysterons actually reflects the nebulous portrayal of native peoples in Western (or more accurately, perhaps, ‘Westernised’) media, who more often than not, even in Anderson’s time, were typically mentioned as ‘conservatives’ or something similar – resisting what was represented as the inevitable ‘progress’ of the militarised, industrialised West which, in its contemptible narcissism, sought to overturn any legitimate existing authority in the target nations in the name of profit. All of this alongside the much more blatant violations of sovereignty we have seen in places like Iraq and Syria, and older involvements by government agencies (for a masterful and at least partly-amusing piece of double-speak relating the history of such events in the twentieth century, I recommend the Sky documentary “Secrets of the CIA” [3]).
One would suggest that there is not, and nor should there be, a single overarching ‘authority’ for anything in this world, as not only does authoritarianism attract a most obnoxious subsection of the human population, it also stifles both practical and intellectual choice; the so-called ‘United Nations’, for example, which likes to portray itself as a beneficial organisation for all nations, is in fact a bankers’ front. Why would nations need a ‘World Bank’ when they have wealth and banks of their own? And would a so-called ‘World Health Organisation’ be there to assist with cures and technologies, or instead be the narrow end of a wedge to sell Western medical products at high prices to less affluent countries? As an example (but only one among many I could point out), the WHO has several times tried to talk up the possibility of a ‘’flu epidemic’ so that nations will spend billions on pharmaceutical products whose benefits are dubious at best, only to have the predicted ‘epidemic’ fail to arrive [6] … it was a cathartic experience to sit back and read reports of people ‘voting with their feet’ and not bothering to get themselves vaccinated unnecessarily.
However, the bottom line is that the series of ‘Colour Revolutions’ themselves seem to have been predicted, in a somewhat cryptic form, in the late 1960s by a hero of popular televisual British sci-fi. I will return to this theme shortly, as it seems clear that Anderson was encoding messages not only in this series, but in others also.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MjlrL_pr9k
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution
[3] http://www.disclose.tv/news/
Documentary_CIA_Agents_Reveal_Secrets_Of_The_CIA/85776
[4] … or, as the late George Carlin liked to say: “…, many of us partially educated…”
[5] See http://www.ex-cult.org/fwbo/CofC.htm, for example, for a brief discussion of cult recruitment. Although the separation here is not mentioned, it would constitute part of the ‘old versus new’ bipolarity.
[6] http://naturalsociety.com/world-health-organization-suspect-huge-flu-pandemic-scam/
Some Thoughts From Another Long-term Teacher in Korea
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Uncategorized
Interesting article from a long-term foreign teacher in Korea, but I would echo what Joe says in the comments – most often it has been the public schools which were at fault, in my experience, rather than hagwon owners.
http://www.eslteachingonline.com/what-esl-teachers-in-korea-really-want-to-tell-hagwon-owners/
Cheating Political Systems and Why We Don’t Need Them
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority
MSNBC Morning Host Admits The “Whole Voting System Is Rigged” After Bernie Get’s Cheated!
https://youtu.be/19WhIG5Emmo
But it’s not just the US and the Democratic Party… it’s everywhere!
And it’s not as if this kind of thing suddenly materialised from nowhere, it’s been around a long time… one of the reasons Margaret Thatcher came to power in the UK was union member disenchantment with a surprisingly similar process: they would elect local leaders who would then function as ‘delegates’ at the major meetings where the important votes were held. But instead of voting as their electors wanted, they voted as they were instructed by the higher leadership. Shop-floor union members didn’t get a look in!
Clearly, voter disenfranchisement (or maybe we might rename it ‘bait and switch’) is an integral part of the utter con which we call ‘Western democracy’.
We might also take a sideways glance at elections in Syria. There are no signs of any malpractice there, according to observers, yet the US persistently wants to label the results (i.e. the successive re-election of Bashar al-Assad by popular assent) as being somehow ‘illegal’. What they really mean is that the popular choice does not further their own ambitions in the area.
Also clearly, ‘Western democracy’ (and the stooges necessary to maintain it – think of Ukraine’s situation over the last few years) is a tool of control masquerading as popular assent, both within and without the actual Western countries themselves.
Maybe it’s time to think up a new and better way to run countries, as this is clearly just another form of Roman-style ‘divide and conquer’ methodology and has nothing to to with the wishes of the ‘demos’ at all. 😛
How to Subscribe to Andrew’s AJAX Chat
Posted by Andrew | Filed under How-To
Instructions as to how to get yourself entry to my private chat room…
Following my recent posting at Facebook, here is how to log yourself in to a private chat room on my personal server:
1: E-mail me to let me know that you would like to use the service. Include the username that you would like to use.
2: Wait… I’m a busy boy.
Users cannot subscribe themselves to this service: it’s private, and I am the administrator – meaning that I also have to allocate a unique strong password to each member. This is a manual process.
3: Navigate to http://myeasternhorizons.com/ajaxchat/, where you will be confronted with a very simple, plain login page:
4: Enter your username and password, then select “Public” or “Private” channel.
5: Choose your language.
6: Click on “Login”. You will be presented with a chat page like this:
7: Chat with other members for as long as you like.
8: Log out link is on the right hand side.
Death of Twitter, Indeed?
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Commentary
LOL People are so whiney, they make me laugh so much… why do folks have such a sense of pointless ‘entitlement’ that they think a commercial platform owes them anything? More, why subscribe to a platform for opinion where the people you try to share your opinion with all line up to disagree with you? Is it simply an excuse to put others down and make yourself look superior all the time? Or are you simply not happy unless your life is filled with endless stress and conflict?
I got a good word to describe these people:MASOCHISTS!
Apparently, Twitter’s falling revenues have made it look for alternative ways of financing itself, which some seem to view as a ‘violation’ (you can tell it’s Americans talking here) of their ‘right to free speech’. But ‘freedom’ surely also implies that you can make choices, in this case to another more suitable (from your POV as a customer) platform… doesn’t it?
This is where the pointless part of ‘Free Speech’ – the violent part in which participants feel that ‘freedom’ is represented by pouring unacceptable insults and threats upon those who do not agree with you – meets the limits of what has been made available ‘for free’: Twitter has to be paid for somehow, and if their notional ‘customers’ do not represent an actual income stream (i.e. they want Twitter’s service for nothing), why do they think that they should have a say in how it is run? This is the trouble, someone has to pay for the servers, the developers, the electricity and so on; it’s a business and it needs real money. But the ‘users’ want to contribute nothing but their opinions, and to do so without limits on their rudeness and arrogance – or so it seems to me.
Now, apparently, Twitter is trying to bring in new income streams which impact what people see on their Twitter pages. Funny, but when I have this issue with (e.g.) Facebook, there is a whole range of extensions and other add-ons to mitigate this – AdBlock, Ghostery, Facebook AdBlock and all the rest. Shit, I even have extensions to change the colours! Aren’t there any corresponding extensions for Twitter, or is it really not that big a deal? Isn’t this kind of thing enough of a motivation for people? Or are they just a bunch of lazy, self-indulgent fools?
Violent written disagreement is a feature of so many on-line fora and the ‘Comments Sections’ of online mags and newspapers: places where people seem to forget their politeness and manners simply because they can; because they really think that ‘Free Speech’ literally entitles them to say anything. But it doesn’t. A person can express a contrary opinion politely and explain their reasons for it; likewise the notional ‘opponent’ should be able to raise reasonable objections and explain their reasons, and the result should be a ‘debate’, not a hate-filled slanging match, because in an ideal world, people might still not agree in the end but they would understand the other party’s thinking better and everyone involved should have new ideas as a result, which should stimulate their own thinking.
Instead, what we have is cesspools of pointless hatred, sticky morasses of putrefying intolerance and one-sided, irrational thinking. The whole thing is protracted because people refuse to seek reasonable alternatives which might come closer to satisfying as many people as possible. Even worse, the ultimate consequence of talking to yourself in an echo chamber is that despite your feeling that you (and increasingly, only you) are right, the lack of contrary viewpoints and the new ideas that they bring only takes you further away from reality. Got a hint for you, folks: this ain’t progress. It’s stick-in-the-mud stupidity!
Also, bearing in mind what has been written in these pages previously, this is narcissism of the intolerant type, so typical of the ‘civilised’ West, a state of mind into which someone dearly wants us to be conditioned. When people behave like this, it shows only one thing: who is really controlling them. There is no ‘free will’ or ‘free speech’ until we realise exactly who is pulling the strings and why. There is no real ‘education’ when this is the result – it is, as I have adumbrated previously, merely ‘indoctrination’.
The intellectual part of public debate in particular has descended into pure infantilism, coupled with an unreasonable sense of ‘entitlement’ according to which individuals expect to express their opinions without being contradicted in any way, shape or form; and they expect to be allowed to impose coprolalial demonisation upon their detractors without consequences, either social or legal. And they think it should be free…
If you really want to be able to express yourself in an echo chamber all the time, is it really so difficult to set up your own forum or chat room? This is something anyone can do – when Opera decided to shut down their social media, I decided that enough was enough and approached a company in Singapore about web space to relocate my blog, and in a space like that you can do anything social media-oriented, if you want to. It costs me just sixty Singapore Dollars a year – almost nothing in ‘real’ (i.e. UK) money – and I can have any number of e-mail accounts, too, which I can set up myself.
There is a Control Panel from which you can install all kinds of services at no extra cost. I have forum space set up (and have since I subscribed in 2013), but I don’t use it to demonise others. And anyone can use it – go to http://www.myeasternhorizons.com/wp/forum/ and apply for free membership. You can have free chat there, too. But be warned: I am the owner and moderator, and you can be thrown off for being offensive, so read the conditions first!
But this is not enough for some people: they want everything literally for free, and worst of all, they want no responsibility for the consequences of what they say or do. And that is the terrible state of Internet commentary – endless, childish flame wars over trivia not worthy of a kindergarten playground fight. What a sad commentary upon Western civilisation!
NOTE: Details of how to access my private chat room can be found here.
Misleading Data
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Uncategorized
An interesting post from the Corbett Report via ZenGardner.com:
It all makes me ask myself how much by way of publicly-published data might be cynically manipulated in this kind of fashion..?
Rather a lot, I suspect.
Best comment from the video: “A representative lower limit uncertainty of ±0.46 degrees Celsius was found for any global annual surface air temperature anomaly. This ±0.46 degrees Celsius reveals that the global surface air temperature anomaly trend from 1880 through 2000 is statistically indistinguishable from 0.0 degrees Celsius.”
Global Warming; a fascinating subject. Not.
Someone Has to Say These Things…
Posted by Andrew | Filed under The Destruction of History
“In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” – George Orwell
The Big D is saying things that nobody else will. He is speaking for people whom British media will not give a voice.
Despite everything that people have said against him, he is still going.
Hear what he says about what is going on right now. There are certain people trying to cover their asses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiG0acDt344
Listen and get your eyes opened.
Why Bosses Are Bad…
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Environment
A great article which I came across by accident today:
http://www.killerculture.com/why-bosses-are-bad-and-other-problems-with-the-work-forced/
Definitely worth a read… it’s exactly what I have been thinking about work for ages.
Grouped under ‘Environment’, but maybe it should be under ‘Health”…
More Experiences…
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Living in Korea
After a prolonged period of relative blogging silence, I think everyone may have noticed that I am inexplicably still here and might wonder what the exact story was… well, for those who don’t know, here we go (unfortunately, not quite as briefly as intended)…
Let me preface this by saying that since I wrote that last note, I have abandoned every shred of credulousness that I used to direct toward people who felt they were entitled to comment upon the foreigner’s situation in a place like Korea. It does seem to me that I was allowing commentators’ false pessimism (and the pessimism of some people around me, no names mentioned) to colour my perception of the situation so that I couldn’t really see what was happening. I’ll come back to this briefly before I finish but first, let’s look at what happened…
Firstly, after about seven or eight months working for the KDLI in Icheon, it was becoming clear that it was a bad fit stylistically, a situation worsened by the employer’s desire for me to be doing the job in a certain way, but unable to communicate their desires effectively. I well recall that during my two-month (!) winter break, my slumbers were broken at 7:30am one Monday morning by my handler there (a Navy Lieutenant) asking me if I wanted to re-sign for another year, and quite aside from not liking my slumbers broken at 7:30am on a Monday morning, I also didn’t like the idea of an extended unpaid vacation each year and a host of other issues which I felt were affecting my health in a negative fashion (like a stodgy diet in the canteen geared towards younger people getting much more exercise and providing the energy they needed for it, long immobile commutes in the shuttle buses and hours each week spent sitting at my desk doing prep work). So I kissed goodbye to a KRW2.8million/month job and returned to my old job teaching kids in Changwon.
And this went on quite well for about six months, until the Friday evening before the 2014 Chuseok weekend… the Boss called me in to his office and said: “Andy, I have a big problem.”
“What is it?” I asked: “Am I doing something wrong?”
“No,” he said: “It’s not your problem, it’s my problem…”
As it turned out, the decline in student numbers his business was experiencing was hitting his bottom line sufficiently for him to be unable to pay me after the end of October: “Please find another job as soon as possible,” he said.
So yet again I was facing another winter where I had to find something new. But after having to deal with a terrible bunch of young students when I had already decided that it was not for me (and the return to Changwon was really just convenient at the time), I decided that enough was enough and would not accept offers to teach children any more, and placed advertisements around my usual wide swath of Internet job sites accordingly. And I had a big surprise (or three) to come …
One day I had a phone call out of the blue from someone in Daegu about a new adult teaching position, which was all the more surprising because when I heard him speaking on my phone the first time, I mistook him for a recruiter with whom I had been in contact for quite some time, so this experience was somewhat disorientating, giving me the misleading impression that a shift back north of Kyungnam was beckoning. We arranged to meet at the ‘Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf’ at City7 and Saturday morning that week, we got together to discuss it. His English nickname was Charles, and it turned out (as I discovered some time later) that he was a high school friend of the hagwon owner in Daegu, whose English ability was very limited. As our conversation progressed, I had the strange feeling that this wasn’t actually an ‘interview’ at all, and pressed him on the point: “No,” he said, and proceeded to tell me what the new employer wanted me to do.
This has been a recurring theme over the last few years: if they want you, you have the job. It’s that simple. The school in Yangsan took me on twice, my old employer in Changwon knew me well, and I didn’t even have a proper ‘interview’ for my current job – rather, a lecture about what I was going to be doing.
So I arranged to shift all my gear to Daegu at some expense (and I won’t go into details here) and started making materials for the start of December. But what I didn’t know was that this new place, which had started only the previous October, i.e. two months prior, was already having the same problem as my two-time ex-employer in Changwon, except with adults, which beggared belief as it seemed to be in a prime location – in deepest Jung-gu with potential students milling all around! However, we had a holiday on Christmas Day and when we came back on the 26th, Jazzy, my friendly coworker, broke the bad news to me just as we were in the final teaching period of the evening (which you may recall was also a Friday): As of completion of classes, I was out of work. Again!
Sometimes it seems to me as if trying to put together a reasonable and stable lifestyle in Korea is like trying to build a house on a sand bank… but thankfully all of the contacts, information and web links were still organised – and still ongoing – on my computer from the previous three months, and eventually led me (via a temporary winter camp job in Changwon) to where I am now, down in Okpo. And after the initial six months here, everything is stable again. For now.
But here we discover an important point: the search for employment should be ongoing. I have a constant stream of e-mail notifications and e-zines coming in to various Inboxes, which automates the process considerably; this is the product of years of signing up on different recruitment web sites, and keeping them relatively updated, periodically. I also have contacts with a range of recruiters, although I do not bother them often because of this. It seems to indicate the wisdom of avoiding the most popular places when looking for jobs; although, when asked, many people with experience might recommend a site like ESLCafe, in reality it is getting hammered and likewise with the advertisers there. When Charles contacted me, regarding the job in Daegu, it was because they had found my details at the Korea4home web site, which in point of fact I had almost forgotten about and was in need of updating. I have set up e-mail accounts and apps to deliver most of them to my cell phone and, more latterly, to my tablet; both devices also carry copies of essential documents for correspondence when mobile.
Surprisingly, I almost ended up at a kids’ hagwon in Seoul, as the manageress there was desperate to replace an American teacher who wanted to return home at very short notice due to health problems in his family (and surprisingly perhaps, despite my misgivings, I do regret this a bit, in part because of the experience I would have had with the technology). But the teacher changed his mind suddenly and I was out on my ear (again), but the manageress there had been very serious about signing me up ASAP, and had assured me that the job was easy because it was all electronic (based upon a tablet platform, you probably know the chain) and my age was not an issue (I had just turned 52 in October)!
I was in the right place, at the right time… it’s that ‘recurring theme’ again…
Because the last few years have been so choppy, and because the tables have had to be turned so that it was myself who fired the bosses rather than the other way around, remaining in a positive frame of mind has been difficult, but the realisation has come to me that I should not become despondent about finding new employment here as I grow older; the jobs are still there. There have also been changes in documents and visa issuances which have allowed me to stay and left me feeling much more confident. Plus, I had been looking at the possibility of shifting to another country, and it was while I was conducting my job search in January that an FAQ on a Cambodia-related recruiting web site finally put my situation into perspective: when asked whether there was any difficulty about being an ‘older’ job candidate, the (native speaker) recruiter responded that ultimately there was no requirement other than patience waiting for a new job to come along – in other words, yes, an older candidate can get a job (in Cambodia), but they just have to accept that it takes longer.
And that little light came on in my head, finally.
And so I end this piece by returning to the point mentioned about about pessimism: there is too much of it from foreigners directed against their own personal misfortunes in Korea. I am not talking here about (say) crimes committed here against foreigners, but rather the frame of mind which causes them to go online and vent their spleen rather than seeking viable alternatives or new directions. All you have to do is look at your options as they present themselves to you, judge which is best (and what changes you may have to undertake), then make your decision and stick to it. This means accepting the initial difficulties you may encounter and being patient while they resolve themselves. In my latest position, this latter stage is now complete, and a new semester began a few weeks ago; and after the initial paperwork was completed, until the next semester, the work is relatively light.
We should remember that a foreigner already resident here has some advantages over the neophyte, not least that they already have their documents deposited, and the recruitment process is relatively straightforward and mechanical. Five out of the last six jobs I have had did not even have a formal ‘interview’; two of them were temporary returns to former employers where I was already a known quantity. I now have a track record of some thirteen years since deciding that my attempt to have a career in science was leading me exactly nowhere and I needed to make a change; and although I was not ultimately able to make the change I planned for in the beginning, the whole thing has been, and continues to be, something of an adventure, although I would definitely describe myself as ‘less adventurous than some’.
But the bottom line is that planning and patience win the day. I was fortunate to be offered a temporary position on a winter camp in Changwon and this allowed me to be in the right place at the right time to be offered my current position, ironically because most of the company’s existing staff were up north around Seoul and liked it there, thank you very much, and were apparently sniffy about coming down south to Geoje, even though there seems very little wrong with the place. They liked their city lights and the entertainments that went with them, it seems.
So we conclude that life has dealt us a salutary lesson. Planning, patience, preparation, an adaptable attitude and being located conveniently have allowed my career here to continue. To those who complain to me endlessly about dwindling job opportunities and getting older, I offer this lesson to you.
August 10th 2015
Edited: October 2nd 2015
