First the bad, then the ok, and then the good

This coming few weeks are going to blow hard for me at work. Since I am taking over the invoiced and international junk for the company and it’s not looking very good. The lady whom I am taking over for likes to do everything herself so I still have a very poor understanding of nuances of what she does (the job doesn’t seem that hard but the fact that there are a ton of invoices, money orders, performa invoices, and files (in Chinese) to deal with for each order makes this a real bummer). I think that after a week or so I’ll get the hang of it or just manage to dump it all off on my Taiwanese coworkers—which is the best choice in my mind.

It’s also really hard to learn from the lady I’m taking over for since she’s super high strung and always seems to be uber uber nervous. For example, today she gave me labels to put on sample cards. Well, we keep some of the cards and send some to the customer. So I placed the labels on the ones that go to the customer, which was wrong, but we caught it long before they were even packed or shipped. Well this lady freaks out. Then again it’s not as bad as the time I tried to send a CD via FedEx document pick up, which really isn’t a big deal, especially when the CD can go out any time during the week (lesson here is to label things as documents to get the cheaper rate and not as CD’s). But good Lord, you would have thought I murdered someone by her reaction! That means even basic and simple questions about things always make me seem like I’m asking her to move mountains for me.

Also bad, the US track team has also continued a very poor run as of late. The exception being a surprise gold in the women’s discus and a sweep of the 400m hurdles. But for the most part the story has been the bad luck of people like Lolo Jones and Sanya Richards. We’ll see how things go tonight for the three sprinters in the 200m against Usain Bolt (if he runs like he did in the semis then it wont be a race at all) so let’s hope Crawford, Dix, and Spearmon can push him.

The ok news is that the men’s 400m is coming up which gives the US good shot at a medal. The relay races should also be interesting and be a real battle between the Americans and Jamacians. The other race that I’m really looking forward to is the 5000m, this is Bekele’s to lose at this point so we’ll see if Lagat can recover and make a run at it. Edit: keep an eye on the 800m too.

At work, the ok news is that my American coworker, the only other white person here, is leaving. So that means only 1.75 people other than me will speak English in the office in two weeks. That will be a real adjustment since I ask my coworker a lot of questions, but at the same time it will be great for my Chinese skills, eventually.

The good news is that Michael Phelps (Fei-er-pu-si) in Chinese pronunciation is a living god and after watching an interview where he talks about what he listens to before his races I’m started listening to his favorite: Lil’ Wayne “I’m me.”

The other good news is I have some cool language partners now. I have the three old people I meet with and help them with English and get a free meal in return. Then I meet with two 26 year olds (a nephew of the old people and his ladyfriend). My third language partner is a girl my age who I have yet to hear put together so much as a sentence in English.

I cannot wait for the weekend to get here; in their song “Be My Escape” Reliant K says “I gotta get outta of here,” and that’s how I feel about the office this week. Just take me to a place without invocies.