The Boss Fiasco: My Weekend (Part 2 of 4)

As I said, Rose, my boss, disappeared in the middle of the day for several hours. No one knew where she went for sure, but someone seemed to think she was in a meeting with Mrs. Gu, the head of ths school. When Rose came back, she was visibly upset: crying, avoiding everyone, not like herself at all.

For everyone except Mom (who's actually met Rose), let me explain Rose a little. Rose is the supervisor at my school. She makes the schedules, she updates the syllabi, she fills in when people are abscent, and she helps whenever we need it (and all the foreign teachers need it a lot). She always does all this with kindness and a smile on her face. She really is a great person, someone whom I really like, and someone without whom I might have gone crazy when I first came here.

There were several teachers sick this week, so my day was PACKED with stuff to do. I never got a chance to ask Rose what the problem was before it was time to head home (speaking of which, the next month or so will probably be packed at work, so don't expect much in the way of emails during the day. Looks like I got the internet at home just in time).

Darryl and I were talking after work, and he decided that we needed to call Rose to make sure everything was okay. It wasn't.

Rose, who has worked at Swaton from the very beginning and essentially helped to build the school, was pretty much fired. Not directly, but pretty much forced to leave.

Here's that happened: Mrs. Gu calls Rose into her office. She just lays into Rose about what's she's doing wrong at school--most of which is exaggerated if not out and out lies. She tells Rose that she needs to work every weekend and stay until 10 every night to do her job appropriately, which is, of course, silly. She says that Rose's trip to Thailand over our Christmas break is "just an excuse to get out of work." And this goes on for three hours. It ends with Mrs. Gu saying that if Rose doesn't like it, she can leave. There's no other way to see it than that Mrs. Gu was pretty much forcing a resignation.

None of this is true, by the way. Rose is a great boss. I've never seen her NOT working. She comes in every day at 9 and stays until 8 at night. She only takes a 15 minute lunch. And she works most Saturdays.

The reason: no one knows for sure, but the school's enrollment has been down--not enough to cause much, but still, enough to be noticeable. Mrs. Gu is shifting blame and eliminating a paycheck all in one swoop.

And the worst part is, Mrs. Gu actually expected Rose to stay on another month at less pay help out during our intensive month (regular schools have a break next month, so we are teaching extra classes that are only a month long). Rose, of course, said no, meaning this is her last week.

The phone call led to Darryl inviting Rose to come over and watch the movie we were planning on seeing. She was in a bad way, that's for sure, but seemed to be better once she chatted with us about it for a little while.

All said, it's probably good for her. She gets worked hard at Swaton and can never travel (something she really likes to do). I'm sure she can get a much better job. Still, it's terrible the way it went down.

For us, it's awful. Rose is one of the people that makes Swaton great. We'll get by without her, sure, and I'm really happy that she can move on to better things, but I hate to see her go. I really do.

Believe me, though, I'm keeping in touch. Darryl and I are already have plans with her to have dinner next month, and she's offered to help us with our Korean once or twice a week if we'd like to meet with her. What a class act.

At any rate, the foreign teachers have conferred and decided we won't just let this one slide (which is the appropriate thing to do in Korea). We've asked for a meeting with Mrs. Gu and intend to tell her of our disapproval of what's happened. The meeting won't be until Friday (partially because of end of the month busyess, partially because if we do it earlier in the week, Mrs. Gu might blame it on Rose and make her last week even more unbareable). I'll post to tell how it went this weekend. Wish me luck.

R