A Fiasco Week (Part I)

Today's weather: High = 25 Low = 17
Partly cloudy

With all the beautiful weather we're now having, it's a pity that this week has been so dreadful to enjoy much of it. I'm trying to make the most of it, but this week felt like we were on a high-speed train, someone sabotaged the tracks, and the train derailed.

So many things went wrong at the same time, and everything happened at lightning speed.

The host of the group that I co-lead on the weekends had an emotional outburst. She did some major major damage to our group and the guests, and we had to pull a last minute change of location. The fallout from that is still going on as I type.

Meanwhile at school, I was gathering marks for the report cards and inputting them, and the computer program crashed. Scrambling to get everything back online and teach a lesson at the same time, I finally made the deadline. That meant having to get to school at 5:30am. Later I found out a colleague was sick at the last minute which meant extra coverage, in addition to supervising a math context that day.

Shortly after, my secretary calls me up and says that the landlord is jacking up the rent next year to 6000 RMB a month which is colossal, and the school is not compensating accordingly. After several failed attemps to negotiate, I lost it and told my secretary over the phone, "Screw this, I'm moving out to Minhang District where I can actually afford the rent. I won't rent this place after June anymore."

I then relayed this to the boss of the school who then quickly replied with an email saying my allowance had now increased to 5000 RMB a month. Now the question is whether to keep the downtown place or not. I have friends looking around in Minhang right now as I type. Basically that district is about a 25-30 minute motorcycle ride away from work and it could very well pan out if I want to eventually register a motorcycle with Shanghai suburban "C plates". More on this in another post.

Amazingly enough, I still made 3 more return trips to Wujiang this week, as part of the ongoing saga of trying to replace my lost drivers license (see last post)

All 3 of this trips were a failure, details below. I'm now scrapping the plan to try and replace the license using my former address in Luxu town at Zplashes hotel. It is becoming so troublesome that I'm better off going through the hassle of re-taking the drivers test, this time using my Shanghai residence, and creating a new identity

Here's how it works: the former license uses the Chinese name "sure dee fen" who is registered in Wujiang, Jiangsu province. We know that "sure dee fen" lost his former passport along with his drivers licnese, so let's just consider him dead. When I re-take the test in Shanghai province with my current passport, I will then be a new person called "sure dee foo". Both names sound like Steve, and they will never know it's the same guy because inter-provincial communication is very poor in China.

That all said, I had to at least try the plan to go back to my former address at Zplashes hotel in Luxu, stay there for a few days, and register with the Luxu police station in order to procur a "registration of temporary residence" form. The idea would be to take that along with several other documents, and attempt to get a replacement drivers license from the main vehicle branch in Suzhou 'province'

3 attempts to try and do this all ended in failure, and I felt bad for the Chinese colleague who was helping me run this errand. It turns out that my current secretary (in Shanghai) didn't register me with the police, which the Luxu police insisted I have that form in order for them to do anything. Does a registration form from the hotel count? No, it doesn't.

Attempt #1: The Luxu police said I had to fax my Shanghai form over to them, and they didn't have a fax machine. We went next door to a shop that did have a machine, and I got a registration form faxed from Shanghai, but it was not recent enough to match the most recent stamp on my passport. So I'm told I had to re-register with the Shanghai police, or else pay a fine. OK, could I pay the fine in Shanghai or pay it here in Luxu? They said I could pay in Luxu but it would take 7 days to process the receipt and then issue the residence registration. They quoted 200 RMB for the fine which is a pretty good deal considering that failure to register in Shanghai would cost me 5000 RMB if I paid over there. This is all thanks to my school secretary who forgot to do this in the first place, or was just too lazy. So I said, OK, I agree to the fine, let's do this. But it was almost 5pm and there wasn't time, we'd have to come back tomorrow.

The registration secretary smiled mockingly and said, "It's time to go off work now!" I pretended not to understand this. She said we'd have to come back tomorrow. But then she said, "The policeman who does fines is here 24 hours a day." Who knows what anymore.