Job Discussion Forums

[Jetgirly]

I would like to hear about your experiences living with co-workers, whether they are fellow teachers or school administration. I have lived with two of my co-workers this year, and I will NEVER do it again! The school I work for is really eager for me to let new teachers live in my apartment if there is a vacancy, but from now on I will avoid it at all costs!

I recently lived with another teacher who (like me) was at her first teaching job. We received the same salary on the same day of each month, yet she could mysteriously NEVER pay the rent. Trust me, it's not fun to watch your roommate pick up her paycheque in the school office, go away for a long-weekend at the beach and then claim she can't afford to pay the rent when the landlord comes knocking!

Furthermore, office politics always have an effect on home life... one day I was having an afternoon nap in my room when my roommate came home from work. She didn't know I was home, and walked into my room with a glass of red wine. She was halfway across the room, apparently not noticing me, when I woke up and asked her what she was doing. She was surprised (and guilty-looking), and spilled the wine all over my floor. I asked her to clean it up and she her response was, �I'm not bothered, clean it up yourself.� That same week, school administration removed her from a class after students and the company HR department complained a third time, and the school asked me to cover the class. I knew it would piss her off but I wanted the money, so I took the class. It was EXACTLY mid-course, that being the date we are expected to submit student progress reports that document their progress from the first class to the middle of the course, so I politely approached my roommate in the staff room and asked her to write the reports (since I obviously couldn't comment on their progress). She didn't write them. The school administration asked her to write the reports too, but she just smiled, nodded and then didn't write them. The consequences are four fold: I don't know how the students have progressed, the school doesn't know either, the company has no record of their employee's progress and the students have no concrete document showing what type of progress they have made. I am POSITIVE my roommate didn't write the reports just to spite me and to make my job harder, because of what happened at home.

DON'T LIVE WITH YOUR CO-WORKERS!

[QatarChic]

Wow! I have heard of worse stories happening to other people though- like a friend of mine shared a flat with a sleep walking TEFL Teacher whilst she was working in Spain, she used to wander around the streets and the police would ofetn have to escort her back home......another friend shared a flat with a guy in Bolivia who used to eat dog food to save money, he was also suicidal........you get the others who sponge off you and just eat all your food or something etc... I have shared with 3 different teachers before and never had any problems... (I live alone now) guess it's just luck of the draw...

[anthyp]

I don't really have any roommate stories to share but the China forums are kind of sleepy right now and I'm bored as hell.

Actually, one of the reasons I decided to come to China was so that I wouldn't have to share a flat with anybody. So I get to walk around naked and listen to whatever kind of music I want. The bathroom's always open and so is the fridge. Best of all, I'll never have any of those "weird roommate" stories to tell.

OK so my girlfriend lives here too, but that's kind of different ... the food in the fridge is still mine. And by food I mean beer.

[biffinbridge]

The Czech Republic 1995...tight,happy clappy, christian,Anglo/American house mate, who slept with ear defenders and eye patches on yet insisted on being woken up if her boyfriend rang.(Her boyfriend was her ex-boyfriend's brother....scary).
Libya 2004...a very friendless,sad Welsh nutter who left notes everywhere and sent you bills for things that cost less than 20p...he went very silent for a while started talking to cats in a scary way and then left..I'm sure he's just the same wherever he his now.

[Kent F. Kruhoeffer]

Funny stuff.

Scary too.

I'm glad the topic has been brought up -

and I hope DOSs & managers are reading it

so they can see this very simple, very candid remark:

If a job advert mentions shared housing,

I won't even finish reading it.

[ls650]

I shared a large, very decent house in Jakarta for a year. The school owned the house, so the rent was deducted from our pay. (You could go find an apartment on your own, but the rate was a good bargain.)
I shared with three women and one male roommates. The women were generally just fine to get along with, but the guy was this Scottish nutcase who was, quite literally, psychotic and in desperate need of therapy. He was hell on the rest of us. Once he left the house at the end of his contract, we had a fine time.

I now have a large 2-bedroom all to myself. I much prefer being on my own, though it's a lot more expensive.

[denise]

Just once, in Prague, and it was fine because a) we got along and b) the school paid the rent. I wouldn�t do it if we had to pay on our own, just to avoid the problems Jetgirly mentioned. There might have been occasional clashes, but nothing unresolvable. It was a fun apartment. (Weirdest color scheme and decor I have ever seen in my life, though!)

Just before I moved in with my co-worker, I was living in a house with other random foreigners in Prague. Two of them moved out and were replaced by a guy who was one of the biggest a$$holes I have ever met in my life. Then another guy, the one whose name was on the lease, left without finding a replacement roommate. Then A$$hole Boy moved out without even telling me, leaving me all alone with a month�s rent to pay by myself and several months of past-due phone bills--several roommate generations back, there were some calls to Ireland that never got paid. I fled in the middle of the night, I believe in the middle of a blizzard, to one of my school�s pre-paid and furnished apartments.

d

[KES]

Rule 1: NEVER accept shared housing.

Problem solved.

[gordogringo]

Lived for a year with 8 women and 3 other guys in Taiwan.Overall everything great with individual rooms and common area kitchen.Only problem was one of the teachers was constantly stealing western brands of chips left in the common kitchen.This problem was solved by a resourceful staff member from New Zealand who put messages with obscene references I have never heard on each bag about what should happen to the thief.No more food stolen for the rest of the year.I still communicate with the majority of my former roommates.Good times overall.

[Chris_Crossley]

I was the first foreign teacher to arrive at the then-new Wuhan (Hankou) branch of EF, so I was the first guy to have the relative privilege of having a flat all to myself for a few months until an American guy called Brian came to move into the second room. Happily, we got along just fine and there were no problems.

Then I met the woman who became my wife and we started having nights together ( wow!) in the flat. My room-mate took it as a signal to start spending nights with a girlfriend of his in his room, too! This was despite the fact that we were not supposed to "entertain visitors" after 11 p.m., but nobody paid a blind bit of attention to this.

In any case, the lifts were always shut off at midnight (much to the consternation of people arriving afterwards!) and nobody fancied risking breaking their necks walking down 14 floors of stairs which had very inadequate lighting, so that one could barely see three steps in front of them when going down.

Two weeks after I tied the knot, I moved out of the flat to live with my wife and her parents. The very next day, my ex-room-mate did a runner along with another of our colleagues owing to the fact that we had an incompetent and sycophant school director, in whom we had no confidence any longer. And yet he told me absolutely nothing of his plans, nor did he even hint at what he and our colleague were planning. They had quite clearly timed it so that I would move out one day and they would do the midnight run the next, with my being absolutely none the wiser - until the next day.

About a year later, I got an e-mail from him, expressing regret at what he had done, wishing that he had stuck it out the way I did. Eventually, that school director did get fired. If only my colleagues had waited, I am sure that we could have become a good team at that school. Then again, based on my and others' experiences, Chinese management teams often do not have the interests of the foreign teachers at heart, only their own.

[dmb]

In my first EFL job I was given a 2 bedroomed house on the beach. Or so I thought. The owner of the school also owned a bar and a few weeks later with the start of the summer season 8 barmen arrived and all lived in the other bedroom. Cramped? just a tad. I was given my own apt. a few later though.

Then in my next job I had a sleep walking flatmate who used to sleepwalk into my bedroom(my g/f at the time wasn't impressed) I moved out after this and got my own place. I would never live in school accom. again.

[Gregor]

Kent - I am a DOS and I am reading this, and I agree 100%. My school has shared housing in the contract (it's a franchise deal, and the contract comes from the head office), but no one will go for it. I managed to talk my boss out of that absurd notion. Who wants to live with a random stranger? I think this concept comes out of the days when pretty much any native speaker of English qualified for a job, so they were treated like university students, and housed dorm-style.
Doesn't really fly in my school, where I have no Chinese teachers, so the foreigners actually have to teach.

[Glenski]

Looks like this thread should merge with the one on looniest teacher you ever met.

[Boy Wonder]

Shared housing is for young, recently graduated newly experienced teachers.
For anyone else it is completely unacceptable.
If i wanted to live with other random adults then i would get an office job in London and flatshare!!!
As a guy in my mid thirties i won't even look at a job if it means living with someone else!

I have shared in Poland, Qatar, Spain and Italy.

In Poland it wasnt too bad at all.....probably made better by the fact i moved into my Polish G/F flat after one month and only returned to my shared flat to watch MTV and BBC when she was at work!!

In Spain l lived in a 3 bedroomed apatment along with 6 Colombians....working illegally everyone of them. Great people....fond memories but one hell of a queue for the loo every morning!

In Qatar it was on a compound for the first 6 months ..all male flats and bearable until they banned women visitors from entering the compound. Then it became unbearable as my G/F was prevented from coming in and sharing the facilities!!! Luckily it wasnt long after that we were given spacious 2 bedroomed appts and no restrictions on visitors!!

In Italy....a dump of a flat...nice people..2 fellow teachers and 2 Ukrainian guest workers...but i had had enough of sharing by then and moved out after 10 days to a two bedroomed flat in the suburbs!

I am now residing in a decent one bedroomed flat in the heart of Bangkok....with total control of the TV remote and free rein of the sofa.
I wouldn't have it any other way!!!

[GeminiTiger]

I live with two Ozzies and myself I am an American. Having little in the way of true understanding of how to get around town and how to communicate with the locals or get to the market, hell I didn't even know how to work the gas when I got here. So in my situation, even though it was recruited under the assumption that I would have my own place, sharing a place has turned into a benefit.

We also have a place that is considerably, (3 times) bigger then most everyone at the college so we have plenty of room to do as we please. (3 bedrooms, 2 kitchens, 2 baths/showers, 2 dining rooms, 1 huge living room, seperate AC in each bedroom as well as a computer with a DSL connection in each room, included as part of our contract. I've seen a native teachers flat for two people that is the size of my bedroom...

Ofcourse I had plenty of crazy roomates back home in the USA, one of them used to steal my socks.. But every situation is different and I would say my current situation is very good and nothing to bitch about!