balls

Our company's event is tomorrow. I don't want to go, but I'm at the very least going to have to make an appearance to satisfy our Orwellian overlords. The Golden Goose is celebrating 30 years of existence; that's what this is about. Can't say that my company has changed the world (Korean education is largely a joke), but I can say that it was involved in a scandal some years back in which the school was forced to pay a penalty for using material from The Economist—making money from the material and not crediting the magazine. The penalty was several hundred million won, which comes out to several hundred thousand dollars: pocket change for a large company like mine. Our company has since been better about not outright stealing other people's material, but there are still R&D departments in the company that create material meant to piggyback on someone else's material. For example (and to be clear, this is a fictional example), imagine people at my company making material based on the TV show "Blue's Clues." The material would all be original, but it would be based on an established, copyrighted product made by someone else. That sort of ethically dubious shit happens all the time. To my mind, that's not why you have an R&D department. Such departments ought to be for developing totally original material that reinforces a certain brand image. But as things stand, our school's leaders are too scared and unoriginal to create their own brands; the leaders have our teachers use established textbooks made by big, international EFL publishing firms—Cambridge and whatnot. Our various R&D departments busily crank out workbooks and exercise sheets based on the big publishers' work. And we're going to have a party tomorrow to celebrate 30 years of cribbing other people's ideas. Yay.