Friday, April 4, 2008

Matthew the Computer Geek


Matthew hails from California and is a graduate of the University of California at Berkley with a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science. He is in his early twenties, thin, with crooked front teeth and baby face in appearance. The only thing missing was the plastic pocket protector that most nerds seem to acquire. Like so many others he ended up extending his stay in Thailand because he fell in love with a local damsel and sought employment as an English Teacher for children, which he was completely ill suited for.

In the classroom he was completely out of his element and each day was a struggle for him.

Because of his immaturity, a complete lack of common sense, no social skills, coupled with his inability to teach, and his general goofiness the children ate him alive. He had no control in the classroom what so ever. He was so bad that he failed to meet three separate, three-month periods of probation. He kept banging way though and the school kept him on the pay roll. Heck at least he didn’t talk back to the powers to be and after all he had that all required white face.
He even attempted to bribe the students into paying attention though a system of rewards of candy, which he devised. The students soon caught on to this ploy though and he spent a good deal of money keeping his candy jar filled with no tangible results. Even when he left his candy jar in the teacher’s lounge his fellow teachers helped themselves.

Matthew also did not like Thai food so he never ate lunch with the other foreign teachers. Each day at lunchtime, he would head off to 7-11 to purchase his lunch, which mainly consisted of potato chips, a snack cake and cola. In fact I believe all his meals consisted of nothing but junk food. There was a brief time when he did join us for lunch. On these few occasions his lunch consisted of mixing honey with white rice. That was it, honey and rice. Sweet.

Matthew was also continually complaining about the lack of money. He often make request from his Mother, but I remember him once complaining that she finally cut him off from any more "loans". Seems as if his better half placed great demands upon his check. If I recall correctly there were a good many medical expenses for the water buffalo up-country, the mother in law or some such non-sense. At one point he was renting DVD’s making copies on his laptop and selling the copies. I bought one of these once, and of course, it didn’t play correctly. Some of the other teachers that bought them had problems as well. I think he ended up giving most of the money back that he made from that venture.

Well, as often happens with so many of the teachers that are hired at this school, he was not awarded a new contract for the new school years, but he was able to find a job teaching computer classes or so he informed us. Hopefully, that was more in line with his skills. When he left on his last day, that was the last I heard of him. No idea as to how things turned out for him, though some of our Filipino lady teachers probably do as I think they sort of took pity upon the poor boy and kept track of him.

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