Our terrible, rotten, no-good FIRST DAY OF WORK

What a clusterfuck!

Our contract states that our first day of training will be Monday September 1st so we asked Ken (our living advisor) what time we would be picked up from school: “Don’t worry! Monday is your day off!” Cool. So on the 1st we slept in and were still laying around in our sweats when we got a call from Allen (our trainer) telling us that we need to be at the Foshan Campus (which is a half hour away by car) by 2:30 which happens to be in two hours. To make it even worse, he said that the driver (who is supposed to drive us everywhere according to our contracts) is not available to pick us up and we need to take not one, but TWO buses. Alen speaks AWFUL english so OF COURSE we barely understood the directions that he gave us. We don’t know where the bus stop is, we don’t know where “the bridge” is that we need to get off at and we don’t know where the Walmart is that we need to transfer buses at. PANIC!!! We run downstairs and order food from the muslim restaurant, shove it down our throats and run back upstairs. Josh turns the key of our front door and POP – the entire lock comes out of the piece of shit door. We’re completely locked out. Can we call the school to tell them that we’re going to be late? Of course not because the phone that the school gave us has no minutes on it and is thus, completely useless. Long story short, Brandon picked the lock but it took a half hour. When we got into our apartment we only had twenty minutes to get ready (to allow for one hour of transit time) and we only have one bathroom.

SOMEHOW, we made it out of the house at 1:30, caught our first bus, found the transfer spot and even caught the second bus. On the second bus, we apparently missed the bridge that we were supposed to get off at because we wound up at the bus garage and were stuck walking a mile back to the main road. It took about twenty minutes but we finally caught a taxi. We’re f’ing LATE on our very first day so you can imagine how stressed out we are as we run up the stairs of our school. “We’re here for the training meeting! We’re so, sooo, sooo sorry we’re late!!!” Dave: “What meeting?”

OF COURSE, Alen told us to go to the wrong campus. The campus that we were supposed to meet at is the one that’s super close to our apartment in Nanhai. FUCKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!

When we finally arrived at the Nanhai campus, Allen just said, “sorry for that.”

Ohhhh, and it was soooooooo important that we showed up for training which just ended up consisting of Allen handing us the employee guide (which we already had) and asking if we had questions. Did they reimburse us the 35 rmb for the busses and taxies? Nope!!