Chinese Job of the Week

October 14

Chinese job of the... something...

I have two jobs to report. Both of them are winners because, well, I haven't posted in forever, I know. So, the first one is the girls in McDonalds who paint the grout of the floor with vegetable oil every night before closing.

The other winner comes from Alex M. who witnessed the sandwich assembly line. The first person holds the bread, the second person puts some mayonnaise on the bread, and the third person spreads it.
12:58 AM

August 26

Chinese Job of the Biweek

This week's Job of the Biweek winner is a job we also have in Canada - so why do they qualify? Because of all the places in the world, this job should be effective in China. It's the squeegie guy, who isn't actually homeless. Well, guys. They sit on a corner near our school on chairs they've brought from home and they have these really nice mop-like brushes they use to actually wash your whole car. Except that they have never had a customer, and they don't actually make an effort to solicit any of the cars that are stuck in the inevitable jam in front of the school at 9:00 every weekday morning. And yet, the second I step outside I get lots of other people asking me if I want to buy fake rolexs, handbags, dvds, handmade necklaces or bamboo flutes. So, I think they're either really useless, or their job is a cover for something. One of the students suggested that they buy broken, used (and/or stolen) cell phones and mp3 players and then resell them as second hand. Or they could be KGB...
3:27 AM

August 19

Chinese job...

I saw this productive job today when I went to LiHu - a surprisingly clean lake in the south of Wuxi - it was a migrant worker sitting on a bench at the bus stop using a hacksaw to cut some old blue 3" diameter hosing into inumerable 12" long pieces. That's "Reuse" for you... or is it "Recycle"?
9:02 AM

August 06

Chinese Job of the Weeks

Ok, I've been slacking off. It's not that I've run out of useless jobs, although I've already gone through all of the best ones. I've just been really busy. Is that ever a good excuse? I'm not sure. You always make time for the most important things in your life. I guess this hasn't been a priority. Well, I apologize. So, here's your long-awaited job of the past few weeks:

Grass Collector - there is a woman, and I don't know why, who goes around the park picking little pieces of grass and putting them in a bucket. I'm not sure if she is cutting the grass one blade at a time, or weeding, or just collecting pieces of grass for some other purpose. Frankly, this job mystifies me. Now, some might say that, really, she isn't working, she's just crazy. But, everybody has to have a job, so unless she's a very rich crazy woman in rags, she's making money doing this somehow. Any ideas?
4:32 AM

July 10

Chinese Job of the Week

This week's prize goes to "concrete aerator" - the guy in charge of punching holes in the cement of a parking lot near our house. They do this with grass in the springtime at home in order to allow extra oxygen into the soil, I guess. But, I hadn't seen it with concrete before. I suppose, at some point, they're going to hire someone else to come along and fill the holes in - though any hole in China gets filled with garbage quickly anyway. But, we'll see. I can't figure out what's more useless - digging a hole, or filling it in...

Also, as a side note, there is a large pile of sand outside one of the buildings near the school that we walk by every day. We don't know what the sand is for, but we see parents use it as a kind of kitty litter box for their children, and animals use it too. I think the pile does get moved from time to time and there's a person there who sweeps the sand back into the pile constantly. But, I was thinking - you could hire someone to be the official scooper of the chinese giant kitty litter pile.... Maybe that's a little too cynical....
12:37 AM

July 06

Chinese job of the week

Sorry it took me so long to post this - can you believe I've started to run out of useless jobs? Or maybe I'm starting to think some of these jobs aren't really all that useless - like the security guard in my office I'm in a war with. His job is to check student ID cards to make sure that no one learns for free. He's made it his duty to conserve energy by constantly turning off the air conditioning, and thus making it incredibly uncomfortable to teach in 40+ degree weather. I hate that guy.

Anyway, the winner this week comes from Stacey again - it's the woman who pours a bucket of hot water down the toilet on the trains in order to flush it.
2:04 AM

June 25

Chinese job of the week

This week's job of the week winning entry comes from Stacey in Tai'An, Shandong province. In Tai'An, they have floor fanners - people who take fans and wave them about over the floor in order to dry it. I haven't seen this in Wuxi - because we mop the carpet instead.

Actually, I'm developing a friendship with the carpet mopping lady. She doesn't speak any english, or any mandarin for that matter, but that's okay, she has a nice smile, when she doesn't show her teeth, or sneer at you for walking on her freshly mopped carpet.
2:23 AM

June 18

Chinese Job of the Week

This week's winner comes from Shanghai, on my trip to get my sister from the airport and bring her back to Wuxi. The job of the week is the person whose job is to hang out the window of a small bus holding a sign and yelling at whoever is waiting near the stop in order to establish where the bus is headed and whether or not it should stop for passengers. Generally, we just glue the sign to the bus and stop at the bus stop, but this is way is better because it gives someone a useless job. Congratulations bus sign holder on your victory!
11:12 PM

June 10

Chinese Job of the Week

This week's award goes to the group of people who have spent the last week protesting out in front of Wuxi Commericial Mansion - the department store attached to my office building. Now, when I say protesting, I mean protesting in a country where opposing the government is verboten. So, by protesting, I mean that the three hundred of them were just standing or sitting around the entrance so as to obstruct and inconvenience anyone nearby. The story is (and that's all I have, because when you protest in China, you don't actually tell anyone what you're protesting about) that this group of people had been employed until recently, when the store laid off everyone over the age of 35 in favour of younger and thus lower paid employees. Chinese stores have a habit of employing a lot of people at low wages to stand around and do essentially nothing. You see this any time you walk into a department store and there are more staff than customers and you still can't find anyone willing to help you find anything. They're always too busy doing nothing.

So - this group of people wins the award for being just as useful unemployed as they ever were when they were working.
10:24 PM

June 04

Chinese Job of the Week

It's Saturday again in China, so that means it's time to announce the winner of the Chinese job of the week award. Really they don't get anything, just recognition.

THIS WEEK'S WINNER IS:

The many men employed in parking lots to help people with parallel and back in parking, because, even when driving a tiny VW or Citroen, it's still an impossible feat for anyone to park a car. They have the job of standing in the way and making hand signals to let you know when you've gone too far

I'm really not sure if the award should go to the parking guys, or the many drivers who manage to own cars and still remain incapable of parking them, but owning a car is not a job, yet.
12:16 AM

May 28

Chinese job of the week

Recently, I've come up with a way to give recognition to the many different forms of employment that arise in a country with 1.3 billion people it has nothing to do with. It's the Chinese Job of the Week Award, given to the person with the most useless or random job.

Previous winners are as follows:

- man who hands out "umbrella condoms" or bags to put over your umbrella in order to prevent leakage of water, but that, inevitably, are always too small.

- woman who cleans the outside of the garbage cans only when it's raining

- public washroom guard

- the four or five different people in the supermarket who have to stamp your receipt before you can leave with your groceries

- man or woman who sweeps the streets with handmade grass brooms

- woman whose job it is to mop (with a mop and bucket) the carpet in my office building twice a day

This week's winner is:

Unfortunately, the popluar candidate for the award this week cannot be named. But, the runner up is the group of people whose job it is to make the elevators in my 33 floor office building not work, by either taking them out of service during peak hours to save energy or by taking them out of service so they don't have to wait for an elevator when they want to go back downstairs. Part of this group is also responsible for watching the security cameras in the elevators in case they need to randomly yell at you. A round of applause for this week's featured group of employees.