An interesting web comic/graphic I found on the tubes. I can see that that there’s a lot of truth in this. In today’s society, we do indeed have in infinite appetite for distractions which lead us away from what is really important in our lives and I’m somewhat guilty myself. Can these distractions ruin a person? You betcha.
So, I need to learn to speak Chinese. Thankfully I don’t need to learn to read or write it, which makes things a lot easier. I downloaded borrowed some “Teach yourself language” MP3s which I have loaded onto my iPod and I’ve been working my way through them since Monday. Well, redoing the first lesson over and over is closer to the truth. I plan to do a couple short courses at TAFE over the next few months because I can only go so far with self study.
Why Mandarin? I do tech support for a global software company and we are getting lots of customers in China because of the massive investment in infrastructure right now. These guys will eventually need to ask questions or will run into problems (not with the software, because that’s perfect) so they’re going to need to speak to someone. We already have Mandarin-speaking staff in Singapore and indeed in Shanghai, but there’s only so many staff. Most of them are away from the office most of the time doing installations, training, audits and upgrades.
Me, I don’t generally travel. I’ve made my preference to stay at home for my family clear to my supervisors and they have honoured that. I generally don’t travel overseas more than once a year. So, I’m almost always in the office. So I’m going to be the one to learn Chinese to speak to our newest customers when they call.
I get the impression that my supervisrs would be happy if I complete a short conversation along the lings of, “I do not speak Chinese. Do you speak English? I can’t help you right now. Goodbye”, or perhaps, “Please hold while I transfer you to Jackie Chan”. But now that I’ve dipped my toe into the warm ocean of the Mandarin language, I’ve set a higher goal. I want to be able to watch a Jackie Chan movie without the subtitles!
I’ve got a question for anyone out there who does actually speak Mandarin: since, to speak the language properly, you need to have the right ascending or descending tones, how does singing in Mandarin work? I mean, the melody of the lyrics follows a natural rising and falling pitch and tone, so does this clash with what is supposed to happen in the spoken language which needs to follow its own rising and falling pitch and tone?
Suzanne is working again today, for the second day straight. That means Nanna takes Ashton to school, and Jett spends the day with Nanna and Poppa who are both (mostly) retired. Suzanne feels a bit guilty about this in a number of ways. Firstly, the imposition on Nanna to drive down to our place to take care of business. And secondly, she feels that she is abandoning Jett in favour of work.
This is true, but it’s certainly not an awfuly terrible thing. I pointed out that Jett is very happy when spending time at Nanna’s, and that Nanna is more than happy to look after him. She has commented that he is very well behaved, mostly does his own thing unsupervised, eats all the food given to him and is very talkative. So, as a once off (or twice off as this is by no means full time, permanent work) it is working well. If it were to become a problem with either Nanna or Jett, then Suzanne may need to decline work occasionally.
So, I’m working for a new company called Jiva. Jiva provides solutions for businesses in maximising the value of their web presence. We sell a range of domain name hosting services, from the basic domain “park and point” to the highest end corporate merchant solution. It’s a startup, and so there is a lot of work involved. Jiva is a subsiduary of the company I used to work for, iiNet. Working for Jiva will provide a lot of opportunities and should be fun.
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