Korean Job Discussion Forums

[periwinkle]

I just had this weird thing happen with a guy from another dept., and now I feel badly about it. He wanted me to help him "a little" with his powerpoint program, so I went over to his desk and it was 32 pages of powerpoint! So I asked him to e-mail it to me, because I didn't want to sit there and have him question me every time I made a correction. I hate it when people stand over my shoulder while I edit their stuff! Well, he wanted to e-mail it me through the company website, but I never use the company site cuz its all in Hangul, and my Korean's not sophisticated enough to navigate the site. Honestly, I don't even know my account, and no one ever contacts me there, anyway. I asked him to send it to my yahoo account. Easy, right? Well, he comes over again and tells me to just forget about it. I told him I could go to desk and edit it at his desk, but he said no, nevermind.

So I feel badly. I'm sure he thinks I'm unhelpful and/or lazy, but honestly, I wanted to do it the easy and efficient way. If I sat there and discussed every little correction with him, it would've taken all afternoon! I have my own work to do this afternoon, and I was just trying to be economical with my time. Arrrgh....

[seoulshock]

why does he need help? is he incompetent?

but is your job to provide tech support?

[Yu_Bum_suk]

I'm in the process of making a power-point presentation (slide-show) with my sister's friend for her wedding, and it's enough of a bugger when both people speak English, much less different languages. We were so helpless creating a soundtrack to go with it that we ended copying the music we want onto a cassete tape to play with our presentation on a ghetto-blaster.

I'd happily help any co-worker edit anything from a word-processor document, but when it comes to something that involves slides, computer formatting, and graphic editing, forget it.

[periwinkle]

[poet13]

You're a terrible person. Offering to do it instead of your own work, and offering more than one way to accomplish the task wasn't enough. When your solutions failed, you should have immediately hired an outside consultant, paid for it with your own money, and performed an act of self flagellation in contrition.

[periwinkle]

[red dog]

[JollyJekins]

What is your job periwinkle? I know where I work, they expect me to be on top of everything all of the time. If I said later to a coworker, I don't think it would look very good on me. Of course no one wants to do it, but it is better to improve working relationships. I find the more you do for others, the easier it is to find help when you need it.

[Mashimaro]

I'm also interested as to what kind of work you do Periwinkle. I want to do non-esl teaching work in Seoul, so I'm interested to hear from anyone doing other types of work.

[Wrench]

[JollyJekins]

I have been here for nearly 5 months now.

[periwinkle]

Well, although I don't teach ESL, I fall into the teaching English for specific purposes category (not business English, though). My contract refers to me as a consultant, because I do whatever the company needs me to do, but its all related to English, whether its assessing English during job interviews, editing company publications, even doing voice work for on-line company study programs, and of course, teaching classes. I think if someone wants to get out of the ESL industry, you could send your resume and a cover letter off to some companies you'd like to work for. My company even has a guy that works in customer service, and he handles complaints from foreign customers. Not fun, but if you really want to get out of the ESL industry... I happened to come across this job because they advertised on English Spectrum. Worknplay also advertises some non- ESL ish jobs, and I've seen some on the Korea Herald (?- joongang daily?), but really, I think the best thing to do is to submit your resume and cover letter yourself IN PERSON, especially, to a company you'd like to work for. Regarding my interview, I'd say I was the least qualified, but apparently all the other candidates were too confident (I'm being polite), and that was a big turn-off to the interview committee..

[JollyJekins]

Gee periwinkle,

Sounds like that helping the guy would be in your job description. Perhaps you are just a lazy sot. You won't last very long in the business world with an attitude like that. You could help a fellow company employee with a simple 32 page powerpoint presentation. Think of the rumors he will spread about you....

[Mashimaro]

[Homer]

I also work as a consultant on contract (as well as teach at my uni). I have been a consultant for a few years now and I got started doing this by offering my services to a company here that planned to open some offices in Canada.

I now have regular contracts (usually 2-3 months long) during the year on top of my teaching at the uni.

Peri,

I think you did not do anything wrong there. The guy probably felt you did not want to do it or that he was bothering you. Perhaps you could have just sat at his desk and fixed his pwpt with him but you felt comfortable with another way of doing things and he perceived it wrongly.

Such is life but since your job seems to be to do just what he was asking...perhaps next time you could just park yourself at his desk and correct that short pwpt doc!