Edit 1/14: Presentation pushed to Monday! Yay!

So I’m blogging with pen and paper on the subway again. Three reasons why: 1) My ipod is dead and I’ve got an hour to kill, 2) tonight’s gonna be stupidly busy, and 3) it makes all the chinese people around me nervous, for whatever reason. I’m not particularly sure why, but it’s kinda funny. So as far as #2 goes I need to eat, go to the bank(?) to buy gas for my house, buy a 50 kuai present for the secret-santa part of tomorrow’s office banquet thingy, update my resume to give to the CFO tomorrow, update my linkedin to make my dad happy, and work on my presentation for Friday.

This last thing’s a bit worrisome but also pretty exciting. Basically I was sitting in on another meeting this morning, and after an hour and ten minutes or so, they had finished discussing all the affairs of the day but still had the room for 20 minutes so they asked me to introduce my work. So I did, albeit in a rather rough fasion and with plenty of noun-translation help from Amelia. After this they decided that they wanted to actually know who I was (little out of order, but hey). This was a mixed blessing:

On the one hand, I’ve had the “who are you and why the hell are you in China” conversation at least twice a day, every day since I’ve been here. It’s highly reminiscent of the first week of college’s “name/major/hometown/dorm” conversations that were canned but still sorta necessary. Anyway I know pretty much exactly where this conversation will go including what they’ll find surprising (I am not European! Who would have guessed? Nobody, apparently.) and I’ve got all the requisite vocab to carry out the whole thing. I’ve even got a standard transition out of it — once I’ve talked about where I’m living I’ll ask where they’re from originally, then see if they have plans to return there like they’re supposed to come the Spring Festival this Feburary. All this to say that I’m pretty confident when it comes to introducing myself, so I could relax a little.

On the other, however, it gives everybody a wildly inflated idea of my fluency level in the language. So when they subsequently attempt to have a later conversation with me that I haven’t practiced dozens of times already, they generally don’t go to great lengths to hide their disappointment. I think they rather understandably feel a somewhat tricked, but there’s not much I can do about that. This is relevant because today in the meeting we never got to that critical second step, so the meeting adjourned with everyone still under the false impression that i’m halfway competent in chinese.

As people were leaving, two of them talked to my boss, and she then pulled me aside and was like “that was good and they’re interested in those American companies you were talking about, so tomorrow could you spend 10 or so minutes discussing the different pricing models you’ve been researching?” I of course immediately balked a little and she offered Friday, which sounded much better but really won’t be because tomorrow night is going to be a mess.

BUT although this is kinda scary it’s also really exciting, because if executed well it somewhat elevates me from ‘random foreigner looking up meaningless data in the corner’ to ‘actual member of this team who potentially has something valuable to say,’ which would be nice.

Moreover I really think that some of the stuff I’ve found could be legitimately helpful/profitable to the company so ostensibly if I can communicate effectively enough and make a persuasive enough case I might actually be able to make a tangible, substantive impact on the brand new groupon-style component of a leading company in the rapidly-growing Chinese travel industry. After only a week and a half here, too. Wouldn’t that be cool?
Or maybe this is just a “we’d like you to prove now that you’ve done something quazi-productive since you showed up, but aren’t going to actually take you seriously,” who knows. Will post about how it goes over.

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Blogging in real-time now, the bank apparently closes at 5.30 so i can’t get gas till saturday, which means i might be rather cold come the end of the week because we don’t have much left. Oh well! Resume and stuff is coming along well, but I don’t know whether I should keep up with my normal chinese studying or take a haitus to cram words for the presentation. Or try to do both. Hm.

Edit: just proofread this, my adverb use in this one was off the charts, even for me. Had to edit out six of ’em. Ick. Sorries if you read it before that happened haha