a call from the ex-boss

Today, the ex-boss messaged and asked how I was. I think he was checking whether I had died. Like some other expats I know, he hates writing and prefers talking—jabber, jabber, jabber, schmooze, schmooze, schmooze, network, network, network.* Writing is like Kryptonite for people who love to talk your ear off. I keep my phone on airplane mode when I'm in my apartment, so I never receive phone calls since airplane mode cuts off the cell phone's radio. This is frustrating for the ex-boss, who wants instant access to me via phone, and it never occurs to him to try to contact me via text or email. (I receive texts while on airplane mode, but only some; I think a lot of texts are actually blocked on airplane mode, too.) From my end, airplane mode makes life so much more peaceful. From my ex-boss's end, my being on airplane mode is a pain in the ass. After getting the ex-boss's text, I grudgingly put the phone on LTE and glumly awaited his call, which came about half an hour later.

We talked a bit about the future. I told the ex-boss I'm no longer holding out any hope for the startup (there's been no mention of a timeline or anything), so I'm on my own. He told me not to lose hope quite yet, so I said in a lackluster way that I'd keep one ear open. Frankly, though, I'm not planning on jumping on board anything the boss might be planning, assuming he's planning anything at all. He told me (as he'd told an ex-coworker of mine) about how he'd gone to work, two days a week, for a hagweon where he could teach Korean to foreigners (the boss is Korean-fluent). But that job didn't last even a month, I gather: the hagweon's "president" (hagweonjang/학원장 or just weonjang/원장) was too set in her ways and had too many little, freedom-constricting and privacy-violating rules and habits, like barging into the classroom—every class—to "take pictures for the blog." But the ex-boss, after leaving that job, now has another job that, funnily enough, puts him right down the street from me at the COEX Building, where he's been tasked with being the native-speaker interviewer on a panel of interviewers for people trying to enter some kind of high-paying work and blah-blah-blah. So the boss can at least pay the bills. Until he leaves that job, too, I guess.

I still have a few tens of thousands of dollars left in my own account, so I'm good at least through the end of the year and through part of next year. I'm putting out feelers to an old job, KMA (which I wouldn't want to rejoin until after I've done this year's trans-Korea walk), but I don't know whether they'll take me once they find out I'm currently a Substacking freelancer and not a full-time employee at a Korean company. We'll see. I'm not going to lead with the "I'm a freelancer" thing. At the same time, I don't want to trap KMA into doing anything illegal, so my current employment status is going to have to come out at some point. (KMA, for legal reasons, prefers to hire people who already have full-time jobs. KMA work tends to be weekend work.)

So there's the ex-boss update.

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*One of my friends is, ironically, horrible at written English—making constant typos and writing in a sloppy style that screams for decent editing to make it halfway readable. Yet this guy is teaching writing and presentation classes at a prominent university in Seoul. Koreans who suspect that many expats teaching EFL have no damn clue what they're talking about are often right to feel that way. A lot of the expats I know wouldn't be able to tell me what a comma splice is, or what the preterite tense is, or what a subordinating conjunction is. They'd wave me off with a dismissive Nah... you don't need any of that.