Tuesday, March 03, 2015

like menstruation

So my arrangement with the Golden Goose is this: since my Dongguk schedule leaves me free on Tuesdays and Fridays, I'm to come into the office in Daechi-dong on Tuesdays. But there's a proviso: if I'm needed for crunch time, then I might be called in on Fridays as well (for pay, of course—not for free). Well, guess what: this week is already a crunch week! My boss told me that, if I do Friday this week, I don't have to come in at all next week, which means that, as with menstruation, we go from heavy flow to light flow. This will be interesting because it'll give me an idea of what a truly heavy week feels like, after which I'll find out what a three-day week feels like. Cool. And so early in the semester, too!

The other thing is that my Golden Goose boss doesn't like filling out the paperwork to get me paid every four-week pay period (I'm a freelancer, so there's no auto-pay for me). He decided to pay me every eight weeks, which meant a two-million-won windfall about every two calendar months. This time around, however, he's elected to pay me for twelve weeks so that he doesn't have to fill out any paperwork for an entire season (for most of my upcoming semester at Dongguk, actually). Mathematically, it all works out to a million won every four weeks, which is fine by me. All I'm doing is socking that money away and/or paying down debts; I'm not spending it frivolously. That said, I'll be happy to receive a three-million-won windfall sometime later this week. Half of that is going right to my Golden Goose coworker, who generously spotted me W1.5 million when I was moving from Seoul to Goyang.

If the gods are with me, I'm also supposed to do a special gig for KMA this month. There's been substantial delay on this point; I had thought that I was to do it last month, but the student in question never got back to KMA with a "Yes, I'll take the course." In fact, we're still waiting for his answer. It's a one-on-one tutoring session for which I'm to be paid the usual W70,000 an hour, plus another W500,000 for having specially designed this course. I imagine that the prospective student and his boss are slowly and cautiously pondering the cost-benefit ratio. It's company money that'll be paying my fee, of course (the student apparently is German and works for a German company), so it's not a question of the German guy's paying out of pocket, but it'd be nice to hear an answer from him soon.*

In theory, then, if all goes well, I could be receiving around W4,000,000 won this month on top of my Dongguk salary. It'll be a twelve-week dry spell after that, as far as the Golden Goose is concerned, but KMA has some gigs lined up for me through the rest of the year; in fact, there's a regular gig coming up later this month for what should be another 500,000 won, give or take a few tens of thousands.

Sometimes the cash flow is thick and torrential; sometimes it's a mere trickle. By March 31, we'll know for sure which type of flow this is.



*I'm betting, at this point, that all the stringing-along means there's an eventual "no" in my future, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed all the same.


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