Office space

Since I last wrote, our company has moved into a new office on the edge of the Hitech Zone of Xian. True to form, corners have been cut and a few pence saved. The building is miles from anywhere, and certainly not in ‘the heart of the Hitech Zone’ as mentioned on our website. The floor we’re on was originally designed for residential apartments, but they took out the walls and put some MDF ones up in different places. Unfortunately, they’ve been put right up against the windows so most of them can’t open. Most of the offices don’t even have any windows, and not being allowed to turn the lights on means those guys sit in semi-darkness in winter. The ones that do have windows are roasting hot in summer. The toilets are right in the middle of the office, so any guests coming have to walk right past them - and some translators have to sit next to them. The boss is okay though. In his huge office, he has a 60,000RMB (£6,000) table and his own living quarters.

It’s not just our company that’s into cutting corners - the developers do as well. There are only four lifts for the 23-floor building, so at midday when everyone goes for lunch, the lift is full by the twentieth floor. I usually end up taking the stairs. Mornings aren’t much better. It might seem stupid not to have enough lifts, but is actually perfectly sensible from the point of view of the developer. Why should he pay more money when he doesn’t have to? They do the bare necessities and leave. It’s the same for residential flats. When you buy a new flat in China, you’re just buying a box of concrete and steel and it’s up to you to decorate it from scratch.

Recently we’ve been doing some recruitment events in three or four universities. This year we’ve done it in conjunction with an employment website company. The woman in charge is one of those very, very short people who’s constantly trying to prove herself. She likes to announce herself as my Chinese teacher at each event. She also has a habit of saying ‘only joking’ after her appalling semi-jokes, as if telling us will remind us to laugh.

Unfortunately, our boss’s wife, Mrs S, number two in the company, is also involved and so brings with her ineptitude and stupidity at every step. We were late for the second event because she fell asleep at three in the afternoon reading the newspaper. Then she got angry and blamed us for not waking her up. During the event, when asked by the short woman to introduce the company, she went off on a 15-minute tangent about how good the company is. Asked three questions, she successfully failed to answer all three. Afterwards, when her husband - Mr Q, the main boss - phoned from abroad, she said there were over a thousand students in attendance. I love the lies. There were actually about 250 people.

In fact, we were told that there would be hundreds of students at each event. Last Saturday, there was a written exam, the first part of a series of rounds to choose 50 translators. The company originally planned for over a thousand people to turn up. The actual turnout was 136, most of whom were not in the final year of university and therefore useless to the company. On Monday we had a meeting where one of the HR guys told her about the low turnout. She was both flummoxed and angry and blamed it on everyone except herself.

I wrote and marked the exam. The final part is reading comprehension, and the last question was a general knowledge question related to the text. Last year the question was ‘Who is Saddam Hussein?’ and it offered some interesting answers - ‘President of America’, ‘a black man’, ‘a bad man’ and so on. This year the question was ‘Where is Jamaica?’. Incorrect answers included ‘Africa’, ‘UK’, ‘London’, ‘Indonesia’, and my favourite - ‘Jamaica is in the Privy Council’.

In other news, four people from an Israeli investment company came with a Chinese investment company ‘for visiting’, as it’s called. Our boss, Mr Q, actually speaks reasonable English so, as main translator, I didn’t have much to do. I think maybe the Israelis thought his waffling, avoiding the questions and general vagueness were because of his English being limited. I think it was a deliberate attempt to fend them off. Mr Q doesn’t want to make the company bigger and better, he wants to get as much money out of it as he can. Ceding control of some of it may make the company bigger and better, but that isn’t his primary goal.

On Tuesday, Mrs S called me in to her office. Apparently the email I sent on her behalf to her daughter’s school in England did the trick of getting her her visa, despite her attendance in classes being lower than UK government requirements for overseas students. She reached into her draw to get something. I thought there would be a red envelope with 100RMB in there. I should have known better. It was a packet of Indonesian coffee beans. That’s now the third unwanted present she’s given me. Her husband spent the last week entertaining government officials in Bali, and presumably one of them brought that back for her. She probably thinks all foreigners have a fancy coffee machine and eat croissants for breakfast.

Other than that, every day is just the usual proofreading technical manuals, chatting to the guy opposite me about China in the 1980s and thinking about what to do when my contract and visa run out in July. Some interesting choices ahead.