Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Wrench]

Yeah there are cheats and crooks all over the world. I made it my moto, "the only trustworthy thing in life is money". Yeah I'm a bit shallow but after getting ripped off 3 times I just don't make any concessions when it comes to money.

[fusionbarnone]

When I started my first biz, i was ridden like a dime store pony(in the first 6 mths; not talking about Korea) until I learnt to protect my own interests. Strangely enough too, later 'clients" contacting me in regards to work turned down working with me when they sensed a non-newbie(naive/trusting). In China I dealt with passive-agressive types(smile to your face and sabotage you quietly; for whatever reason known or, unknown) predominantly. Koreans seemed more direct in comparison. I found getting paid meant "attaching" the face of a respectable friend helped pull the won.

[Fat Sam]

Exactly the same thing happened to me a couple of years ago.

I had a regular private -the easiest possible, with a businessman who just wanted to chat in a coffee shop for an hour a week for forty thousand. After a few of months, he phoned me all distraught on a Friday night about a translation he had to do for his job by Tuesday.

Three big-wigs who couldn't speak English had spent a week in Switzerland on a global conference and hadn't understood a word. Imagine that? What a massive waste of money. They had, however, recorded every seminar on CD ROM and needed to show their own bosses what they'd been up to.

When told I would be paid at my usual rate, I cancelled my weekend plans and spent a total of fourteen hours at his house listening and translating. It was a bad recording, many of the delegates were from non-English speaking countries with strong accents and on top of that, the subject matter was tyre and safety specifications in cars -a very technical scientific subject. I'm sure that a professional, legal translation service would have charged at least sixty thousand for such specialised work.

Of course, it wasn't legal, but considering our relationship (teaching for four months, meeting his wife and kid) I never saw it coming.

He phoned the next day to say that his boss refuses to pay more than two hundred thousand won for one-off private work. It's company policy, apparently. That's a hell of a knock-down from the five hundred and sixty I was expecting for giving up my weekend.

I was livid but couldn't even say much because I hadn't been paid a dime at that point. I tried to point out that this might lead me to a less than favourable view of Korean business practices, but I was wasting my time talking to the middle-man when the guy with the money couldn't care less.

I got the reduced money (minus tax) and a text message to confirm it was in the bank. He never called me again -I'm guessing down to the embarassment. It wasn't his fault, but I hope he learnt a lesson. I certainly did and would follow the earlier advice of cash in hand before doing something like this again.

[joe_doufu]

What you should do is insert a couple of HARDCORE PERVERT PORN paragraphs within the body of the work. Seven or eight of them, disguised as much as possible. (Like, find sentences where you can just change one word to make the whole thing totally raunchy.)

When the clients pay you in full, hand over a list of paragraph numbers and tell them how to fix them.

[Dan The Chainsawman]

Shaddup Tyler Durden.

[Karabeara]

Update:

I was paid about 60 percent of what I was owed. I was told that they had to take out tax (very small amount) and that they count a certain number of words per page. So they are claiming that a page of what I corrected did not actually equal a page. Of course, this was not told to me before. It was just some crack excuse they made up.

I got the phone number of the agency in charge of this, and went ballistic on the woman. She refused to give me the name of the Ph.D. guy, or his school. I have her English name, her company name, and told her I will be posting it all over everywhere I can think of if she does not pay up tomorrow. Her company just changed names, too. Gee, I wonder why they had to do that?

[Wrench]

[joe_doufu]

[Canucksaram]

It is shameful that you must be corrected in your own spelling, in your posts, as to what is proper English.

"Payed" is not the same as "paid."

I can see why, from only a grammatical point of view, you were dicked with.

Moreso, for the poster that came oh-so-many places after you, the term "moto" must be noted as not being the same as "motto."

It's too bad that Ph.D.'s (newspaper style) or Ph.Ds (otherwise) can't be sure of what they're getting, in the way of "proofreading," here in Korea.

Either step up to the plate, or acknowledge that you're in the wrong game.

Pyongshin, back me up, here!

You're one of the truly sane and reasonable voices of "truth" on this board!

P.S. Note that, from time to time, drink can excuse the odd mistake, but not essentially fundamentally wrong spellings. Tsk, tsk.

[J.B. Clamence]

[Pyongshin Sangja]

[jazblanc77]

[IwalkAlone]

Wow. I believe you bled that OP dry pyongshin. I am almost too afraid to post here after that massacre. It's always a fascinating sight when people give emotional posts the same scrutiny as one's master thesis. In Kara's defense, I enjoyed your post. Not because it was lacking in conformity to the "Pyongshin's grammatical rule book" but because I could feel the emotion from it. Something that would have been lacking if you had taken the time to revise and edit and then submit. Sometimes the best posts are the ones that read like the mind works. Give me the spontaneous khool speighlings anieday!

[babtangee]

[laconic2]