Paranoid

As our astute readers may have noticed, we are sometimes getting a bit paranoid regarding our work place here.

Or are we????

One thing F did not mention in his previous post is one additional reason we had for not wanting to turn in our university ID cards: if we cannot see our salary data, it seems reasonable to assume our institute can also not see our account, and hence cannot transfer our final salary.

When Ms. No first asked us to return our IDs, we sent her a friendly email with our concerns (not being able to access our salary data and upcoming teaching evaluations). We ended the email with the request if she would also double check if the institute could still transfer our final salary (still two months remaining at that time) if we would close our university account.

Ms. No never responded to this final request, and we hoped (but did not trust) that this meant that the answer to our questions was that of course they would make sure of that.

And then this week has been rather good so far -- we received the reimbursement for our trip to Vietnam without any problems, and we received our "housing fund" that we apparently saved money into over these two years. So we thought that, really, we were just too silly to think that the giggling second-in-command would go as far as to try to make the secretaries trick us into closing our account prematurely.

But NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

This evening, I received a call from the lovely Number 2. The phone number she called from was outside China and she said she noticed just now that she cannot access our Tsinghua account anymore (this is impossible, because the university system can only be accessed from inside the university). She also said she just called HR and they said we handed in paperwork to close our account (this is impossible because HR is on vacation). And hence, she said she has no way to pay our final salary.

So we are not paranoid! Yay!

This is not a blog post

We are not really able to give you a full account of the "party" today. Let's just say that we behaved. Everyone behaved. It was highly awkward, and not just for us. If you follow the institute's news items, I am sure you will read some wonderfully poetic stories about the warm and fuzzy feelings we all shared tonight.

Unfortunately, other events here, which may or may not be perfectly innocent, have sparked up our paranoia about how these last few weeks here will enfold. And we do not enjoy feeling paranoid.

BUT! The good news is that tomorrow we are off to Vietnam for a conference. This is where we are staying for this ordeal. (Before you think that we are just whiners who in fact are being treated really well (which in some sense is of course true): the institute refused to pay for the conference hotel, and we found a really good deal on this one!)

Learning a lot

After seeing the nice side of China, we now see a lot of the rotten stuff. We don't know if our institute is representative of China, but we pray to the gods it is not.

Anyway, I am learning things. About how important some things are that we take for granted.

- We cannot be sure our email (or even this blog) is not being read by our superiors. This did not worry us before. So what? we thought. What are they going to do with it? But all of a sudden, it does seem like a big deal.

- We do not have anyone we can turn to. The ....less leader is the supreme authority. No matter that he has a stake in this conflict, and therefore should not be the arbiter. In our case, this is frustrating, but not the end of the world. But in general, the Chinese seem to be in a much worse situation, because they could run into this kind of situation in any part of their lives.

- The giggling second-in-command does not shy away from bad mouthing us, and some of our colleagues don't seem to want to talk to us anymore. According to Amanda, this divide-and-conquer management style is quite normal for a Chinese supervisor. We must say we don't miss talking to these people, but what if we had had to stay and work with them for years to come?

And so, we feel blessed that we were not born in this part of the world. We do not mean to insult Chinese readers, because we do know that not all of China is this way. But China does seem to have a system with way too much corruption and nepotism that allows this kind of thing to happen.

And of course our ....less leader allowed it to happen, too. Something for which we still have no words.

Fortunately, we get to leave soon(ish).

We need a little love

Things are not going well here. What we expected would happen, seems to be happening indeed -- we may lose our last month's salary.

We arrived here in August 2008, but could not register with the university at that time, because the HR offices were closed. We were told that we would get paid from September, but that this would be no problem, because we would just get paid for an additional month after we left. The same thing happened last year with another postdoc.

Now, the institute is denying that this ever happened. They claim we chose to come before our official appointment date, and that the fact that we worked during August is irrelevant. Unfortunately, we do not have any record of our starting date -- we have emails in which we discuss possible dates, and we discuss that we may want to take a language course in our first weeks. We did not end up taking a full time language course, and we got an office, and started meeting with people at the institute from the beginning of August.

We feel confused, angry and even physically ill, because our boss does not even seem to be willing to hear our side of the story. Sure, it is only month's salary we are talking about, and maybe we should not get too worked up about that. But this lack of any respect for us is something we really did not expect.

So I think we need some long-distance hugs. Please do not send them by email to our official email addresses, but either to yahoo or gmail accounts, or in the comments.


Amy has us by the tail -- a picture from better days.

Team Franke scores!!! China still way ahead...

We are back on the internetz!

We have been suffering from slow connectivity for a while, and recently it became so bad that A had no connectivity at all, and F had to renew his IP every 5 minutes or so. We were worried that the Great Firewall bastards were onto the fact that we almost exclusively visit the interwebz that are on the other side of their leaky wall, and that maybe this was part of a targeted campaign.

Yes, we suffer from delusions of greatness and paranoia.

The China Unicom people were not very helpful (how could we expect anything else) and told us we did not have a problem. When that did not work, they told us it was our problem, not their problem.

Somehow, we still convinced them to send someone over with a new modem/router (our third one in just 6 months -- hurray for quality). And lo and behold, the internetz opened its jade gate for us!

Intoxicated by this unexpected success, F called the water workers for the 100th time in the past fortnight. This morning, they had concluded there was no problem -- they arrived after we had ran the water for 30 minutes (this turns out to be sufficient to get it to turn hot), and since nobody else complained in the last two days, it was clear that we were confused and there was no problem.
This afternoon, the worker turned on the tap, and after waiting 30 seconds, the water turned lukewarm. "可以" was his reponse (meaning "it is OK"). Right. Who doesn't love showers that are colder than your own pee.
Then the worker found the problem, after disappearing for 30 minutes: who can expect hot water at this hour of the day?! We must have been confused.

To be continued...

Also, we ate a hamburger.