This week at Inkreadable was fairly quiet. I was able to devote three days to VIPKid and the rest to various students and my self-care regimens. which of course I will not bore you with, as they aren’t really relevant to this blog. But needless to say, everything was quite nice and easy and without stress. Until Friday, that is. Why you ask? Sit back, relax, and give me a second while I open a bottle of single malt.
Right, where was I? Oh, yes. Friday. I had kept my calendar clear of most of the teaching until Friday. TEC maintains a WhatsApp group for teachers to know about incoming students and potential clients. There was a flurry of new students and intensives (four-hour classes) through the week and I was waiting until Friday to find out whether I would be placed on any of them. It turned out that I would be placed on most of them in some capacity. Either I would share the teaching with one teacher or multiple teachers. It also transpired that I couldn’t open VIPKid bookings because I wasn’t sure about my schedule. That was OK until Friday. On Friday, I was all scheduled for TEC and could begin to look at VIPKid and what I could do for them. It happened that all of my TEC classes were too close together to be able to make it viable for me to open any classes for VIPKid any day but Thursday. And now, dear readers, the plot thickens.
I misread my schedule. On two different fronts. In the first place, I misread Thursday as Friday and so opened up VIPKid slots on Friday the 30th that I shouldn’t have. So I had to cancel them. That’s three more cancellations for this contract. And it’s only August. I now have just over a month until my contract renews in September and I’m now doubly worried that I won’t get a raise. In addition, I haven’t been working as much for VIPKid and so my raise potential is in jeopardy because of that as well.
Things in TEC land we’re not particularly copacetic either. While on a Skype call, at 5:45 in the evening on Friday, I realized that I had been an even bigger mistake. On 30 August I double booked myself in a way that would be impossible. I booked an 11 to 12:30 PM class in Amstelveen, And then to top it all off I agreed to teach from 12:30 to 2:30 in the city center. My meltdown during the Skype call was epic. I literally started hyperventilating over the phone. Luckily, the person that I was with understood and was able to talk me off the ledge. But it was terrible. What followed was a flurry of very agitated thinking out loud, phone calls, and mad dash typing of emails to figure out if I could change the lesson in Amstelveen from 11 o’clock in the morning to 9:30 in the morning. Thankfully my student was able to do it. But I was not able to find out about whether the location would be available until almost 11 pm on Friday evening. It is the house of the owners of TEC and I was unsure whether they would allow me to teach at 9:30 in the morning since I wasn’t sure what was considered too early. To say that it was a fraught Friday would be the greatest of understatements. Luckily I was on my own on Friday evening and could calm down before I saw Jasper. I was secretly thankful that he decided to stay home on Friday evening and then I didn’t have to cook or do anything more challenging than to use my microwave.
Having decided to try and figure out my calendar issues, I downloaded Google Calendar to see if that might help me juggle all three of my schedules. Well, all four if you consider my personal schedule as well. I will tell you that it didn’t really help on Friday night as I wasn’t able to see the cluster fuck that was 30 August. The jury is still out on that. I will, of course, keep you posted.
Writers Group this week was not a particularly productive experience for me. In addition to worrying about my schedule for VIPKid, TEC, and my students, my tech issues at the bookshop continue and I am not able to connect to the Internet there. As a result, I had to use my hotspot. Which I don’t like doing because that’s for emergencies. And the bookstore is not usually an emergency. But it turns out that I had a class on Friday that needed sorting out and I needed the Internet for that. I tell you it’s been a week. I don’t think I want to repeat it.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there is more to come.
Inkreadable 