all that's left

I think my boss is in denial. While it's possible he may pull a rabbit out of his ass about our team's future, the passive-aggressive lack of communication from our CEO, whom the boss tries daily to contact, indicates to me, at least, that our streak of miracles is over. Personally, I'm also a bit miffed that the boss is playing this game until the very last minute, i.e., by the time we definitely know that our team will be leaving the company, we'll have only a day or so to clear out. It strikes me as a bit rude not to let the team know, well in advance, whether it's time to move on. The last time this happened, I preemptively moved my stuff out of the office, and by the boss's own admission, it was my initiative that prompted him to try harder to contact the boss and secure us another year of work. It's also how we ended up on freelancer contracts, i.e., more monthly pay but no benefits and no severance.

As things stand, there's not much left for me to do. The designer has to work at his own pace. All that's left is two proofreadings of the textbook we're working on after the designer has had a chance to lay out the text in his way and introduce his own errors into the process... and since our contracts end on December 31 (Tuesday), that's most likely not going to happen, i.e., I won't have time to do two full rounds of proofreadings. We'll be leaving in medias res, with only seven or eight books of a twelve-book series done.

Working for this company has been an exercise in vanity, not to mention a close-up look at the ridiculousness of Korea's "education" system, which is overly conservative and prone to deliberately ruining creative efforts because of an ego-driven need by certain higher-ups to put their "stamp" on things. I've heard this same story in other areas of Korean life as well: native-speaking foreigners who do a perfect job of translating and/or proofreading material, only to have some superior with horrible English come along and make "corrections" based on his daft notions of "nuance." The result is once-pristine material that is little more than a Konglishy abortion. And this happens over and over and over again, with no one ever learning. If I weren't already humorously cynical about the whole process, I'd have rage-quit the industry long ago. But as I've said for years, I'm in it only for the money. And that well now seems to have run dry, at least as far as our current team goes.

This upcoming week is going to be interesting. Brace for impact.

And what a way to cap off this year.