Well, I think we have time for one more Ronald story before I change jobs.
And this one, I think, beats the lot.

I told my McDonald’s class today that I was leaving and their reaction was very touching. Ronald, in particular, seemed almost broken up about it, “Don’t worry about it,” I said, “They’ll find you a new teacher who’ll be able to teach you ‘take the third left.’”
We then had a fairly relaxed, freeform class. As I left he asked me to wait while he went for a pee, which I did. While we were waiting for the lift I asked him what he was doing today, knowing he had the day free. As he answered I could see that his face was trembling.
We shared the lift down with a delivery man and his trolley.
When we got out of the building I asked him where he was going and he replied with some Spanish I didn’t understand. And then he told me he was in love with me.
“Oh,” I said, “I have to go to the bank.”
“Me too.” He dashed ahead of me, went to the machine and withdrew a token €20.
We withdrew our money in silence and left the bank.
“Well,” He said, “Perhaps we can meet sometime, not in my house of course,” This is a man 30 years my senior with a wife and two kids, “Maybe in yours… Anyway, call me.”
He backed away, making the universal symbol for phone with his hand, turned, and headed back to his office.

Well yes he is, I shall tell you why later.

As many must have gathered by now I quit my job today. My boss did look shocked. Afterwards she ignored me when I left as she sucked deeply on her cigarette.

My first class that I told I was leaving nearly made me cry with their reaction. The second class I told offered to help me steal all my teaching material by photocopying it. Undoubtedly the hardest thing about leaving this job is leaving the students, all of whom I’ll miss, even the difficult ones.

With the company, however (and thus far I’ve never mentioned their name to avoid having this blog show up in search engines, but now that’s ok, it’s Berlitz, a big American multinational), there’s no love lost. Heaven knows I am no ardent capitalist, and I know its sole reason for existence is to generate cash. It does this by exploiting an essentially bottomless resource, namely us – native speakers – and burning us dry. It can do this because we are plentiful and require essentially no investment in terms of training (I had a total of four hours).
This may sound like a bitter soon-to-be-ex-employee speaking – not so, I’m not bitter, and my view is borne out by the facts – my own situation, the teachers who left en-masse last month, the feelings of those still employed, and, I was told today, the same thing happened last year – in March a full half of the teachers left.
And I’m not bitter – this is how capitalism works, and for better or worse I have shackled myself to this system. What I don’t fully understand is the apparently genuine dismay and incomprehension of our bosses at these turns of events.

I don’t know, but I can guess. And here we enter the realm of fairly wild speculation.
I think there’s a reason that the directors of the individual schools are all Spanish women with a lower level of English than some of our students.
I think there are two reasons.
Firstly, combined with the fact that the receptionists (who are tasked with relaying information to the teachers) speak no English, and many of us teachers have a low or no level of Spanish, it helps to create the advanced level of miscommunication in which we all work and that provides the not-so-minor level of chaos that is necessary for the smooth running of a corrupt bureaucracy (and that is what the schools are). Secondly, and possibly more importantly, it provides us, the teachers, with a level of linguistic power over our superiors because we control the product the company offers. Language is a powerful thing – a very powerful thing – and it keeps the hierarchy unbalanced and hence everybody insecure in their positions. The directors may run the schools but they rely on the organisation above them to provide them with teachers who (subconsciously of course) they fear and who they must mollify (within very strict limits) and retain for as long as possible.

Ok, I think it’s fairly well established by now that I’m a horrendous cynic, and also that I see monolithic engines of control and subjugation all around me, but well, these are my musings.

This has been a meaty blog post

Re: Decision Making.

Thanks to everyone who gave me sound advice and let me explain my quandaries to them. You know who you are, you’re all beautiful.

I was led to believe in the past that people only seek advice because they want confirmed what they have already really decided. I gotta say this has made me a bit of a solitary decision maker. But sometimes it’s not good to be solitary. And sometimes you just dunno whata do….

And you do want honest advice.

So I’ve got a new job, and I’m starting next Wednesday.

It’s working as a classroom assistant in a bilingual school.

I’ve already written about why it was a dificult decision to make but in the end I think this job is going to be a lot better in many ways.
An added advantage is that I’m going to be working with an ex-colleague who quit my current company for similar reasons to me… it was she who put me up to the postion being available as well, and she added her advice, so mad props in that direction.

I’m going to miss almost all of my students, they’re great people, and there’ll be no more Ronald stories for the blog :( And I feel bad about leaving them all in the lurch.

What I’m worried about now is that I’m essentially running away from my current job – I’m going to hand in my resignation tomorrow, but I’m not giving them the notice that my contract requires me to. I’m not sure what this means to be honest – are they going to kick my (financial) bottom?

Fingers crossed I’m not going to be too much out of pocket.

I’ve never written a resignation letter before. It was kind of fun. As you know I love language and it was interesting to write in a domain that I don’t normally have occasion to.

Still tired, day spent with much running around. Must write the more meaty blog posts that are rattling around in my skull.

Besitos chickens.

Little bit too tired to write with more goings on of the weekend – maybe tomorrow.
There’s a new page you can check out… in furtherance of the recent post Befores and Afters there’s now a whole page dedicated to the Befores and Afters of the pictures on my fotolog page, I shall try and keep it updated.

And finally, this is what we’ve been building towards… another snailsnail rumination… scroll down to watch the video.
It turned into a kind of epic project, but it wasn’t meant to be. I made the last rumination as a warm up before starting out on a certain wedding video that still hasn’t been finished yet and so before re-starting that I thought I’d make another little rumination. Unfortunately I got rather lost in the shear wondrous expanse of Public Domain footage that is available from archive.org. I estimate that I went through almost 30 hours of footage to make this four minute short. And hence, what with a busy life and so much to get through, it’s taken the best part of two months – well, a month and a half.

by the way… the first few moments are blank, and the first 20 seconds or so are without sound.

So, all the footage in this video was downloaded from the Internet Archive, all of it is public domain apart from a couple of clips which are Creative Commons licensed. If you fancy exploring Public Domain footage I can recommend these works that are used in the film:

Volcanoes
A documentary about volcanoes with some just astounding footage of eruptions, lava and the like.
Dating: Do’s and Don’ts
Educational film on how to ask a girl out on a date.
A-Bomb Blast Effects
US Army footage of an atom bomb test.
Robot Reality
Health and Safety video on Robots in the workplace (yes, I capitalised Robots).
Garden Wise
Insanely long and tedious advert for some kind of crazy mega-polluting garden product, but – it has amazing time-lapse footage of flowers blooming.
Safety Through Seat Belts
Old film about the importance of wearing seatbelts, includes cool footage of crash test dummies and car crashes.

Today I had one of my cultural Saturdays. I’ve had a fairly disastrous week- nothing major but everything seems to have gone at least marginally wrong and I’ve been rushing around like a headless chicken trying to sort out all my mistakes. So at a leisurely pace I ambled down to the Paseo del Prado – a broad, tree filled boulevard in the centre of Madrid, thronged with tourists and all that goes with them, that is home both to large chunks of the Spanish government and to some of Madrid’s major art galleries. Because of the upcoming elections the street is draped with campaign banners for the two main parties – red one side of the road for the PSOE, and blue the other for the PP.
My aim was to go to a new art gallery there opened (last week I think) by La Caixa – one of Spain’s biggest banks. However, the queue was (probably predictably) humongous, so, after hanging around a bit to listen to a quite cool band (they had a ukulele and the lead singer wore (and played) a drum kit around his neck) that was playing under the gallery (which is of a rather curious design, maybe I’ll photograph it for you when I’m able), I strolled off to the permanent outdoor book fair that is nearby to have a browse (though without buying anything as I’ve already used up this month’s book budget) and then pottered about the large exhibition of sculptures by Igor Mitoraj that is installed in the street at the moment (I think as part of the opening of the aforementioned gallery). To be honest they didn’t do much for me, though some were fun – giant lips and heads you could climb inside, but it was nice to stroll through an exhibition in the open air.
Finally I topped the day off with an hour or so in the Prado (which also had a silly queue) most of which I spent with the El Grecos and the Goyas.

It’s time to improve your English folks:

Shock has been expressed by certain parties in the past when I have confessed that I photoshop all my pictures. Personally I don’t think there’s any reason to be shocked – I don’t regard photography as the representation of reality, rather it is the representation of ideas and images in the same way as is painting or sculpture, and I am not overly fond of realism, I like photos to have an overprocessed look and so I often go out of my way to push photos until they look overdone. Here are some before and after shots from my fotolog, including tomorrows:

As you can see, I prefer widescreen images (I also like squarer aspect rations), I like over-saturated colour and higher contrast. The other changes I tend to make is softening images with haloing, removing as much noise as possible (my digital camera laces images with a lot of noise) and sometime I will change an image substantially by adding or removing parts of it.

Some members of my family are notorious at making decisions,
I like to count myself one of them.
Actually, I hate it… I want to know with the instinct of a shark mauling its prey exactly what to do… I can pretend sometimes – for example, choosing what to eat in a restaurant… this is an eternally difficult problem for us woolly thinkers, and very frustrating for those around us, however, it is easily solved. My solution is to eat the first thing I see on the menu that sounds interesting, and I don’t read the rest… it’s that simple. After a while you can extend the rule a little to modify what you eat, for example, I may, after a number of visits, find that I keep ending up eating chicken, for the sake of variety I may well say the next time I go to eat before I open the menu that I shall have the first thing I see that sounds interesting that doesn’t have chicken in. You can make others too, but this is how to pretend to be good at making decisions.

Unfortunately lots of things in life don’t quite work like that. One example of this is, right now I’m thinking of buying a new camera, maybe… here at least I have the liberty of time, and I’m not bothering anyone with my dalliances, so I’m building a spreadsheet which contains the technical specifications and summaries of reviews from several different respected photography and technology sites and so on in order to facilitate arriving at a decision (which may well end up being – I can’t afford a new camera).

Unfortunately lots of things in life don’t quite work like that either. For example, I am thinking about changing jobs. I have mentioned this before, when the last load of teachers quit, and now there are more positions available to do what they do – to be a classroom assistant in bi-lingual state schools – which is by all accounts a lot of fun. I really like my job in lots of ways – the students are fun, I enjoy teaching, I love language, my fellow teachers are great, the money is good (not great, but good). But, and this is the main problem, my days are very long. This week, for example, I will have worked a 56 and a half hour week. Now don’t get me wrong – I have lots of breaks in that time… I only actually teach about 29 of those hours – but still, it’s too much. The new job would be a lot less money, and I may end up working a long way from where I live. But… I will work a fixed timetable and a lot fewer hours and my evenings will be free and I can take on private classes.

Now don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not asking your advice, this post is just a little like my spreadsheet, albeit more public, but I need to decide soon, by tomorrow really, and I’m totally in two separate minds. Oh dear.

-Pornography is dangerous.
-Why?
-I took a Microsoft Security Certification and they told us that 95% of viruses come from photo files.

[Actual conversation I had today]

There have been snippets, lots of little snippets to write, but no full entries, and I haven’t felt like micro-blogging.
I’ve been generating titles faster than content. A lot faster.
Here then are some little bits.

It rained properly today for the first time in months. It’s dribbled yes, it’s spat, it’s rained in the night – making a cacophony out of metal shutters – but today I got soaked going to work. It is good.

I kicked a football to a child and didn’t make a fool of myself.

I went to the filmoteca again to watch more Spanish shorts. They were better than last time.

Ronald gave me more stuff. This time with his name on it.

I have been sleeping very badly and consequently somnambulising my way through the day. By the time I got to my geek class at the end of yesterday I just let him talk about  packet sniffing and American imperialim (do you spot a theme here?).

I can’t cope with Spanish post offices.

I finished my cutting and sticking and painting and colouring in (see the fotolog if you don’t get it) but I lost the memory card for my camera so I can’t show you.

The massive bruise on my shoulder may have been caused by a fight with a girl

There is a downside to the all-night party lifestyle of Madrid, believe it or not, and that’s when you wake up at 11 in the morning in an unusual Metro station surrounded by three security guards.

-Hello, they said
-Hello, I replied
-Where are you going?
-Ummmm, I replied, temporarily unable to remember where I live, Pinar del Rey
-That’s not on these lines…. is it?…. what line’s it on?
-Line 8
-Ok, so you have to go to Mar de Cristal
-Yup, I know
-Here’s a train – look, you’re not going to fall asleep are you?
-No, of course not
-Off you go
-Bye, thanks

Only in Spanish of course.

So I slept the rest of the day and much to my annoyance missed my language exchange with Rosita, dagnamit, what a tool.

On Friday I taught my first private English lesson, with Rosita’s mum… I think it went quite well, though you’d probably have to ask her really, I’m hoping to get a few more of these if I can because I can charge quite a lot more than I normally get paid, but the problem, as I think I’ve mentioned here before, is one of time – we shall see what we can do though…
And yeah, last night… well, I have managed, and I’ve no idea how, to develop something of a knack of not paying for drinks here in Madrid. This is the third time it’s happened. I went to a little party with other teachers (and ex-teachers) where I demonstrated superb omelette turning skills (also bread-toasting skills) and then we went out to a bar where we swung a lock-in and free drinks all night – so yeah, that’s how it happens.