da NEWS

[Originally posted Thursday, July 30, 2015, at approximately 2PM.]

So: an update on my work situation, with a wee bit of insider information.

It may be that my work for Mr. Y of the Golden Goose has paid off a nice dividend: now that he knows what I'm capable of, how fast I can deliver the goods to him at need, and what a nice guy I am, he's as eager to bring me on board as my immediate boss is. What this means, on a practical level, is that I might be hired as early as mid-August, which is cause for rejoicing. An August hire date beats an October hire date by a mile, and it also means that my "no debt by age 50" budget, which had been knocked back a few months during my last adjustment of it, will now be back on track. If all goes as planned, September will be an amazing windfall of a month. And here's why:

1. In theory, I'll be getting W4.7 million back for pension.
2. I'll be getting my first salary payment from the Golden Goose: about W3.7 million net.
3. I'll be getting back the W3 million won that I had deposited for my current studio.
4. I'll be getting THREE payments for three sessions done for KMA: W1.35 million.

That's a whopping net of 12.75 million won in my bank account, and yes, this may actually be happening: a perfect storm of income. Now, of course, this could still go wrong in many different ways: I've been disappointed before. Commenters have warned, for example, that my W4.7 million pension might not arrive because the pension office assumes I'm leaving the country. My friend Charles, however, assures me this isn't true, based on his own school-transition experience. Or perhaps the Golden Goose will drag its feet about hiring me. Or KMA might cancel the final two of my three aforementioned sessions. Murphy's Law is always lurking in the background, so the picture I painted above is admittedly a rosy, optimistic scenario. But at this point, it also seems to be a likely scenario, the way things are going.

My Korean-fluent American boss, who had been away for two weeks, told me the back story as to why Mr. Y appreciates what I did for him. The documents that Mr. Y had given me had been farmed out to a gyopo who works for the firm—a Komerican guy whom we'll call "B." B was supposed to create the TOEFL-style lessons for Mr. Y, who was slated to be teaching the material. Mr. Y's English isn't that great, but he's a wary man, and after reading through the documents that B had prepped, he suspected that he needed someone else, someone capable, to run through the documents and clean up any errors. When I first did this for Mr. Y, I failed to use the "track changes" function so that Mr. Y could see just how many changes had needed to be made. When Mr. Y gave me the second batch of documents, I clicked on "track changes," and sure enough, the MS Word files all ended up covered in red marks. This is typical for the work I do in Korea: when I proofread Korean documents that are written in English, I almost always end up having to rework them from top to bottom. When Koreans get their work back, they're always—always—shocked at how many mistakes I've found and how many corrections I've made. Mr. Y was no exception. And he was impressed. And he was apparently not pleased with the piss-poor job that B had done.

I've heard rumors that B—whom I've never met—is arrogant and a bit of a megalomaniac. I don't know whether he's going to suffer any consequences for his incompetence, but he might. My immediate boss told me—and I'm going out on a limb by writing this—that he suspects B didn't graduate from college, which would be absolutely revolutionary, and not in a good way, for a gyopo. Still, B is a teacher coordinator, and thus something of a big cheese, which I suppose proves the old "Law of the Septic Tank" once mentioned by my high-school biology teacher: the biggest pieces rise to the top.

Well perhaps, like that impish dwarf Tyrion Lannister, I'll have a chance to enter the company and, in my own small way, "do justice."

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that all stars remain aligned. Getting $11,000 in cash in a single month is quite a windfall; I'll have way more than enough to pay for a plane ticket, get my hanbok, and pay for hotel expenses while I'm in the States this coming October. And by the end of this year, I'll be able to pay off my first major debt: my car. With that debt out of the way, I'll free up about $215 a month, and that extra money will be going to pay off my second major debt: the OneMain Financial loan I took out in mid-2013. I'll be able to pay that fucker off by April of 2016, thus freeing up another $255 a month. And that's how I'll be working my way up the debt ladder, until I'm finally able to pay off my enormous Sallie Mae loan in 2018 or thereabouts.

The party I'm going to have, when I'm finally free of debt, will shake the heavens.

It'll shake the Kevins, too.


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