Money. It’s all I seem to think or talk about. Or more fittingly, how little of it I possess. Prior to my move to Paris, I lived on my own just once, whilst studying for my undergraduate degree. However, the great thing about university is, you’re living amongst fellow penniless youths, all happily chipping in a pound for a bottle of cheap liquor, whilst unashamedly asking a friend to bank transfer you that two pounds for the McDonalds you both scoffed the night before. In addition, as I was studying in Nottingham – a city that has claimed a northern accent but rests in the Midlands and possess minimal northern charm – it was fairly cheap, meaning I was able to do my weekly shop for under twelve pounds; this was providing I still had some tins and dried goods left in my cupboards from my parents’ most recent visit. Sadly, this sum would be unheard of in Paris. One week, I went to my local shop to get a tiny bottle of olive oil; I also purchased some toilet paper and an apple. When I left the establishment, I had almost spent my daily allowance, and it didn’t soften the blow that it was on possibly the three most boring items that the store had to offer.
Differing from my university experience, the majority of my friends in Paris were quite frivolous with their money. They were on their year abroad, so unlike me, they had their student loans and various bursaries to fall back on. To frustrate matters further, most of them had well-paying jobs, thus could saunter out for supper if their fridges looked a tad empty or could spontaneously get a tattoo anytime they pleased. I often irritate myself, because I seem to have become the kind of person who points out that they have no money, but rarely does anything to remedy my situation. However, I’m also easily swayed. If somebody recommends staying out for an extra drink or asks to go to a fee-paying exhibition rather than one of the many free museums in the city, I’ll very rarely say no. Maybe I have a fear of missing out, or angst around letting people down, or more accurately, I just enjoy the thrill of carelessly spending money that should actually be spent on food that isn’t pasta or pesto.
In anticipation of living off a dismal au pair’s wage in one of the most expensive cities in the world, before the move, I worked many jobs. First of all, I worked at a bar just outside Cambridge’s city centre. Despite being managed by a creative family-friend, it was a poorly run machine due to the Head Office’s interference and because it was constantly in search of a ‘niche’. When I first joined the force, it was a cocktail bar that prided itself over its list of a hundred to choose from. Each of the drinks were equally sweet and equally disgusting. It seems to be a running narrative for hospitality venues, having over a hundred of a product on offer. A few years back, I worked at another bar in Cambridge that claimed to have over a hundred gins available. This fact would often excite the customers, and after you’d provided them with a list to choose from and tried to upsell a few rare botanicals, they’d normally appear flustered and reluctantly ask for a Bombay Sapphire; the one gin we didn’t have. The aforementioned cocktail bar, also wanted all of its drinks to be vegan. This attempt at a ‘niche’ made sense for the venue’s chain which was attached to a vegan restaurant, but when customers strolled in expecting the same experience and were offered halloumi fries or a beef burger, the disclosure that the cocktails were vegan meant very little to them. Thankfully for me, this job was short-lived due to a national lockdown and a magical scheme called ‘furlough’.
Though furlough had its perks, it meant I had to find a way to fill the hours formally spent at work or complaining about work. As a result, I decided to undertake a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course. It was a fairly easy course, though a tad tedious. Its main selling point was that it enables you to eventually teach and live overseas or from the comfort of your own home. I, therefore, saw it as a safe fallback option for the future. After completing the 120-hour course – which I can assure to those of you considering it, did not take that long – I started searching for online teaching jobs. By this point in time, furlough was coming to an end and the hospitality industry was reopening, so it was assumed I’d be returning to my job. Due to my mild lockdown induced cabin fever, the thought of returning to a bar and making ‘Zombies’ or ‘Unicorn Gins’ for eager and newly legal drinkers was unappetising. Therefore, it was already time to turn to my fallback option. I came across a company based in Beijing which allowed ‘teachers’ - or those who had recently spent two hundred pounds and a couple of months clicking through monotonous slides – to create a timetable that would suit them. Thanks to the time difference, I would only need to work between 11am and 2pm, which to me was perfect.
The training process was both gruelling and humiliating. The format of the lessons was to follow an animated, semi-interactive video where characters would pop up on the screen playing a variety of musical instruments or different sports. In a Barney the Dinosaur fashion, you as the teacher had to perform these same actions, with your homemade props, for the students. The props were pretty much a requirement for the role, yet were merely ‘suggested’ by the individual training you, therefore arriving to the lesson empty handed was met by a pitiful and self-righteous glare, cautiously letting you know that you’d thoroughly let yourself down. It was also assumed that everybody who joined the company owned a laminator. I of course did not, so consequently, spent many hours laminating pictures of bikes and guitars with strips of sticky tape. The humiliating part came when I had to do dry runs of my lessons using the trainer and a fellow trainee as my mock students. Baring a gruesome Chesire-cat smile, I grasped at all the retained knowledge I’d acquired after many years of watching my mum teach her drama lessons, and switched into performance mode. What made the fifty minutes all the more cringe-worthy, was that my faux students put on babyish voices in order to make the lesson feel more realistic. The woman in the training videos, who I was modelling my persona off, was called Callie. In her videos, she wore huge Mickey Mouse ears and an alarming shade of red lipstick. Before she started her mock lessons, a few seconds of footage was included where she was seen talking to herself and trying to navigate her computer. It was both haunting and magical watching her go from being slumped over her screen, tutting at a presumably slow device, to suddenly turning into a Disneyland rep whose nauseating grin and soul-piercing eyes made you feel as though you were in immediate danger.
And then came the worst part – the robot dance. In the middle of the lesson, to give the kids a small break, there was a ten-minute interval. In order to maintain the children’s engagement during this break, a playful, child-friendly song began alongside a video. The video was of two of the company’s employees, including Callie, dressed as robots, dancing to a song that repeating said “I am a robot, I am a robot”. It was then sprung onto me during my training that in the first two-minutes of this break, I had to join in with Callie and her metallic friend, and also pretend to be a robot. It was around this point I started having doubts about the job. I thought I’d be spending a couple of hours a day teaching young Chinese students how to count or maybe help them learn a friendly greeting or two. Instead, I was being asked to transform into a person vastly different from my general character, and not only act like a theatre kid mid-acid trip, but to dance like a wind-up toy that would provide joy for, to be discovered, no-one. However, by this point, I was too invested. I had exerted too much energy and had used too much sticky tape to back down. So, when told to dance, I danced.
After four weeks of on and off training, I was ready for my first lesson. I had a booked and confirmed fifty-minute lesson the following Wednesday morning. During this period, we were still in a semi-lockdown, so like myself, my mum was stuck in the house. Due to the sheer embarrassment of my new teacher persona, I forced my mum to vacate the house for an hour. As the lesson loomed, I began to sweat profusely. I was well-acquainted with the anxiety and the anticipation of teaching unfamiliar children on the other side of the world refamiliarised me with this unpleasant feeling. The way the company works is that, before each lesson starts, the kids have a twenty-minute introduction with a Chinese teacher to prepare them for the content that will come up in their English lesson. Whilst this is happening, the English teacher waits in a chat room until the children appear, fearfully watching a timer counting down to zero. I wretchedly watched the minutes turn to seconds. 30...29...28... I began aggressively clearing my throat in fear that my “Hello, I’m teacher Sadie” would come out gravelly and like I’d been chomping on a cigar moments before the lesson. 3...2...1... As the timer hit zero, nothing happened. I continued smiling, but solely at my own reflection. As the minutes passed by, and the children were still absent, I messaged the IT team. I was assured that the students were just a tad late. So, I maintained my grin in fear that a small face would appear on the screen whilst I was mid eye-roll. After twenty minutes, and many exchanges with the company’s support team, I was informed that when the kids eventually do show up, it was required of me to teach the lesson in its entirety in the limited time that was remaining – which was absurd and ignited a sensation close to rage. As the time crept by and my frustration grew, I told the team that I could not teach a lesson in the time that was remaining, and the lesson should simply be rescheduled. To this I was abruptly told that if I exited the chat, I would not be paid. Of course, nobody showed up, meaning after a month of tiresome and humiliating training, my embarrassment was furthered by a student-less lesson.
It took a week and a half for a second lesson to be secured and by this point I was already mentally over the job. At this rate I was only making fifteen pounds a week, which barely covered two return bus tickets to Cambridge city centre. As I gathered myself and my props for my next lesson, the well-accustomed perspiration commenced. I saw and watched the timer slowly creep towards zero. However, this time when the countdown finished, five Chinese children’s faces popped up. As if somebody had slotted some pennies into me, I fittingly went into robot mode and introduced myself. I then animatedly asked their names, to which they looked at me blankly. Ignoring the silence, I declared “Well, it’s nice to meet you all”, adding in a few limp actions in hope of their understanding. Next, I asked them how old they all were. A couple of them responded by laughing at their siblings who were clearly lurking just out of shot, one shovelled cereal into their mouth as if this was a valid answer, and the last student remained expressionless. It suddenly dawned on me that these kids could not speak a word of English, unlike the lower intermediate students I was promised. Like the genial teacher I am, I journeyed on through the lessons, falsely praising child after child for muttering the odd noise that sounded vaguely similar to either “I play the guitar.” After an unbearable twenty minutes, it was time for the robot dance.
As Callie and her fellow robot began throwing their arms around in different right-angled positions, so did I. With each new robotic pose I tried, my mouth seemed to get wider and wider, as if I was that impressed with my dancing abilities that I believed I was becoming an actual robot. The aim of this intermission was to engage the kids and encourage them to dance around with you, however, all the students looked baffled and started sniggering to their off-screen family members at how uncool I was. After the two minutes was up, I turned off my camera for the remainder of the break. Though I was no longer seen, the children’s cameras remained on. There was nothing creepy in my observing, I was just curious as to how they’d act when they believed they were no longer being monitored by a teacher. To my surprise, many of the kids started to doing the robot dance after the video had stopped. They were unashamedly mocking me. By this point, I desperately needed the fifty minutes to be over, so I sped through the rest of the lesson, quickly deciding that the job wasn’t for me. Despite my decision to soon terminate the contract, I was shocked when I read the feedback from my lesson and was told I needed to retake my training. To make matters worse, the company used an impossible payment system, thus I received no compensation for my hours of prop making, my lessons taught, or my sweat-stained teaching attire. If I was wiser and maybe less cynical, I’d have found lessons learnt during this experience, however, I came out of it humiliated, unpaid, and with bruised cheekbones from an insatiable amount of grinning.
I had begun to forget this painful month and a half, that was until I returned to the UK for a visit during my time living in Paris. My mum and I were pottering around the kitchen, and as per usual, I was whinging about my lack of money. Mum casually brought up that it was a shame that my days as an overseas teacher hadn’t worked out, as that would have been an opportunity to earn some extra money whilst in Paris. I humoured this remark and told her not to bring that up as I was still scarred. She then turned to me and uttered, “I reckon there’s a video of you on a dodgy spoof website doing that robot dance.” I let out a fear-tinged laugh. “I bet it’s got thousands of views too,” she continued. I was unsure which was funnier, her comment or the fact that she considered a thousand views to be a lot these days. Though the likelihood of this being true is slim, part of me is too scared to look, just in case. However, if there is a video out there acquiring thousands of views, I’d like to know if it’s receiving any revenue, as I’m still waiting on my payment.
Love it, im on the look for the video now xx 🥰
Love this! Lots of relatable moments and I can hear your mum laughing at her own comments to you!!!