The Game

In the old days you would join "The Foreign legion" - if you were running away from a relationship (or the law) or just wanted a more interesting life.

Nowadays we play the ESL game, we go and teach English overseas. And we meet so many interesting people, some of them colleagues, some students, and some employers of ESL teachers.

While the teachers have a variety of reasons for joining the game - only one of which would be the need for money - employers join the game to make money.

With our experience of three schools in two countries as well as having talked to many other ESLers, we have found that payday comes once a month, on a particular day of the month. But - just like playing "Snakes and Ladders" there are a lot of traps to avoid!

Pay Day Game

Its always hard to know when is the best time to head down to the pay office on Pay Day. Sometimes we can end up spending most of the day waiting for the cash to arrive on the premises ... its all part of "the game" of course.

Yesterday was Pay Day, but we all had to attend a staff meeting in the afternoon. On a "Snakes and Ladders" board this would have been a "ladder" - but we didn't see that yet. At the end of the meeting we were quietly discussing whether to go down to the Pay Office together, or one at a time, when we received the news that there was "not enough money" today, we would only receive 30%, and the rest in three days' time. Hmmm - that would be a "snake"!

We decided we would definitely be attending the Pay Office together, united we stand. We told our slightly startled-looking manager (through an interpreter) that we would all return to work as soon as we were paid in full - that was us climbing our "ladder".

The rhetoric that followed was largely lost in the translation - he's sorry, he has been a teacher too, he knows we come to work on time and have the right to be paid on time, if we knew him better we would give in at this point, and (the clincher, as always) he would help us if he could but its out of his hands ... He hoped we would at least accept the 30% and take the evening lessons because it would be difficult for him to contact all our students in time.

We (all) smiled sweetly and professionally, and - clinging to the top of our "ladder" - reiterated that we would return to work as soon as the money was paid.

Then we went out and had coffee together - something we had not managed to do before. We started taking bets on how soon the money would appear. Would we be having a full 2-day "holiday"? Or would they suddenly remember which drawer they had hidden it in ... We were all quite keen to get paid rather than be off work. Some of us had borrowed money from each other to get to this point, one lucky colleague had even scrabbled around under her bed and found a few coins to buy breakfast.

Oh look, there it is!

Well, it took an hour - even less time than we expected! There was our pay, all neatly divided up into pay envelopes. After our coffee together we picked up our pay, grabbed our books, and got back into class.

This is the game we are part of.