60 Chinese People
I’m in a computer lab on the 12th floor. Shoveled some Chinese food on the 10th. Somebody ate all the noodles and I was left munching buns full of strange viscous meat. Chinese food is weird. Maybe I was eating Civet Cat.
I talked to the Network Admin and got them access to a computer lab. Now they ask me how to help them log into pages full of Chinese characters I cannot read. They want to do video chat and download strange software that spits strings of ?????????? at me.
Networking is much harder in Chinese.
The 60 are High-School and University teachers learning English, and how to teach English. I heard China was investing heavily in Net infrastructure, and these 60 seem to be used to broadband. The first thing they asked me was how to get on the wireless network with their laptops.
China must be doing well. Omigod, they’re already unplugging the network cables from PCs and plugging them into their laptops, which they’re not supposed to do, but I’m pretending not to notice. They have to reach under the table and pull the LAN cable out from the PC. This is the sort of thing McGill pays me to do. This is the sort of thing I do for people in my office.
I’m more impressed that they know how to annoy the local Network Admin.
I’m in this corporate skyscraper. I miss my office loafers. My snow boots are ugly. Why I’m here is cause Dr. Cartwright just pulled in a contract to train 60 Chinese teachers in English as a Foriegn Language. Which is why I’m here. It’s a fair sum of cash, and a lot of work. My friends Jane and Caroline are organizing it. All 60 of these teachers have to be housed, fed, and kept from freezing to death. And taught English, and how to teach English. I stayed up doing a PowerPoint presentation which Dr. Cartwright gave. I made sure the damnable projector worked, and sat in front changing the slides. He’s good at speaking off the cuff. The Dean of Continuing Education (this McGill faculty) seemed to like it. The presentation is here:
http://indi.blogs.com/Work/montreal.ppt
I think this is work, or some form of it. I don’t want to go to class anymore. Mostly I want to sleep and read my book. I think I’ll go home and take the rest of the day off.
Thats a very nice presentation. I now have a much better idea of what Montreal/canada looks like, great!