“Dude you are the worst pimp ever!” I said walking into Kins’ office.
“Ok. Go on.” He chuckled.
“I asked for a well read bitch and you gave me one with sunburn.”
“Did it take you long to think of that one?”
“Just the tram ride over.”
I had finally finished up with Minkins and Minkins as after the announcement that we were closing nobody had wanted to work their contract out. I sold the computers and vacated the offices early and was a free man. I had of course the work in the garden and the upstairs of the house to keep me busy but by and large I was free to amuse myself.
“Am glad you came in. I have an offer for you.” Kins announced.
“You want me to work for you now?” I joked.
“Not me. For yourself.” He wasn’t joking.
He explained that many of his Polish customers pestered him about giving English lessons but he always refused. He asked me to consider doing what was called conversation classes. It sounded simple enough. I could talk in English but what would we talk about?
I had searched everywhere for what I considered a real job but the one thing that was really in demand in Poland was teachers. They called them native teachers.
That use of ‘native’ again. At least if I set up my own company and co-operated with Kins I wouldn’t have someone trying to tell me how to speak my own language. I had actually had a few meeting with school owners and it’s possible that I met the worst three but in truth it’s unlikely. Even the English guys who worked at schools were treated like school children.
The Polish system seemed to call for students to be shouted at when they made a small error. I didn’t feel comfortable with that. I was learning Polish and understood how hard it was learning a foreign language. I certainly wouldn’t have appreciated someone shouting at me.
I agreed that I would go and meet Kins’ client to discuss teaching them. First I needed to establish my own company. Luckily my favourite translator had some experience setting up a company and he came along to show me how it was done.
In short it was done by waiting around a lot.
You started by going to one office to apply.
Then after they posted you their response, you returned to tell them that they spelt your name wrong, even though you had provided them with your passport.
Of course it was my mistake great lord of the public office. I am sure that my passport or myself misspelt it and not you.
Then you took the little piece of paper with the all important stamp on it to another office across town. There you waited in a queue to be given a ticket to go to a desk where you were handed another form, this one was six pages long.
You filled it in then once again queued to get your ticket to see the person who gave you the form.
Once you got there they told you that the original piece of paper which had been given to you with the all important stamp on had another error on it and that you must return to that office all the way across town to discover the person, the one person in the whole building who dealt with what you needed was on holiday.
So after waiting two weeks you return to be told that due to that persons holiday there was a back log of work and you would be seen in three days time at exactly 3:15 pm. This is Poland though so they use military time.
After having started this process a young man you are able to pick up your toupee on your way to get your final piece of paper which comes with a different stamp. All the time the lovely people you meet tell you about the government’s plans to streamline the process. That will be nice. It would have been better if they already had done that instead of costing me my sanity.
“What’s your sign?”
“What?” I said confused.
I was sat waiting in the foyer of the accountancy firm that Kins had asked me to teach. The company’s lovely secretary was reading her horoscope and wanted to tell me my future. I have to say the idea that there are only twelve personality types and those in one set have the same day didn’t seem logical to me. The idea that in the vastness of Space, with galaxies upon galaxies rotating around just to align on a wet Tuesday morning to tell an office worker in Warsaw that she should watch out because today a stranger would bring her good fortune was a bit much.
“Oh, I don’t believe in that stuff.” I said.
“Me too.” She replied.
She smiled at me, put her magazine down and returned to her computer. A group of four men in their thirties and forties came to greet me. They ushered me out of their second floor office and up to a conference room on the floor above.
They all introduced themselves and then I introduced myself and I asked them what they were looking for in a teacher. The blond guy who looked the youngest answered first.
“Am interested in Africa and charity work.” He said.
“Well I don’t know much about either but am sure I could find a lot of stuff on the internet. Is that what the rest of you are interested in too?”
“I am more interested in discussing the International Accounting Standards.”
The bald one answered.
The others screwed their faces up and it seemed that a consensus was going to be met.
“So you want individual lessons?”
More hours, more money.
“I want a woman.” Said the man with the obvious jet black dye job.
He then got up and left.
His partners just sat there stunned and the last guy who I hadn’t heard from just looked at me.
“What about you? What do you want?” I asked.
“Anything. I need practice and talk. Maybe football, maybe movies, some news.
Everything is ok for me.”
“Well it is certainly different. Is there anything that you all want to discuss today?”
“No. It is ok. When will we start lessons?” Asked the amenable one.
That was that.
My first clients.
We ended up agreeing that we’d go over email templates, presentations, go through the International Financial Reporting Standards handbook and practice writing letters but the conversation aspect was still a point of debate. It was easy to pick up new clients, well actually accept new clients because the next day a friend of the bald accountant called and that snowball just kept on rolling.
Friends of friends, neighbours and colleagues contacted me about private lessons. People were more than willing to pay cash in hand and invite you into their homes or workplace so I didn’t need an office. I still had the flat at Granny Towers but I only welcomed two or three clients there for our first meeting and then explained my situation.
Nobody could believe that I was staying in Poland or that Elly wasn’t blonde. It seemed true that most ex-pats married Barbie girls but everywhere you go people like to file things away in neat categories. People, clients seemed more at ease when I explained that I was staying in Poland for a woman. I don’t know why they found it so hard to believe that an Englishman would make it his home, it was really starting to grow on me. There was something very refreshing about walking down unfamiliar streets, like a permanent holiday.
Any time any clients told me how hard English was I shared my stories about trying to learn Polish. This was a really useful tactic and helped me put them at ease. I would purposefully mispronounce words or highlight things that made me laugh that they wouldn’t have seen. Humour and patience were the key tools to building a rapport.
I started an online course teaching me how to teach English. I learnt that there were more than three tenses. Apparently there isn’t just the past, present and future but a multiple of things called the past perfect and the past perfect continuous. The things we take for granted about English such as articles, no not those in magazines but the a’s, an’s and the’s, are really difficult and have very specific rules of use.
Polish doesn’t have equivalents so when translating thoughts in their heads into English they wouldn’t use them. Where I might say that ‘an elephant is too big of an animal to fit into the car’, they would say ‘elephant is too big animal to go in car’. Also you start to recognize such things as idioms, phrasal verbs and collocations. The worst thing I noticed when reading communication from English people to my Polish clients was the use of partial idioms.
A client was completely flummoxed by a distribution manager who sent her an e-mail saying, ‘we shouldn’t count our eggs,’ omitting the part about only not counting them before they’d hatched. While I recognized the saying straight away the poor sales manager was left searching for other possible meanings.
After only a few weeks I was up to thirty hours of meetings a week. That sounds like a part time job but considering my preparation and travel it was closer to a sixty hour week. After the relative calm of managing the call centre I was too knackered to even try with the fucking mess of a garden. Even when I wasn’t teaching I was doing my course online, learning about gerunds and modal verbs, about linking clauses and tag questions, all the things that you can’t remember if someone ever taught you but you do subconsciously.
The hardest thing was not trying to make every student learn the same thing just to cut down on preparation time. It was very appealing to find one topic and make every lesson that week about it. Every client truly was unique and things needed to be fine tuned to their ability. When it was late on a Sunday night and I was tired I could have just given in to the laziness. I had heard an old man in the Bee Keeper Inn say a million times that if you only had a hammer every problem looked like a screw.
I was determined to be the best equipped teacher there was in Poland and when a problem required a screwdriver I’d have enough about me to see whether I need to use my flat head, crossed or even one of those fancy stared bits you got in your IKEA toolbox. If I was going to teach I was going to be a fucking good one. I probably read more of the BBC website than the editors did.
I was my own man though and I was working again.