Stig's Update

Well, it's been about a month since I left Korea, a time to rest and recharge.
I've been enjoying being back in the Great White North, but it sure is a change from the Land Of The Morning Calm and Afternoon Difficulty.
First of all, the weather. I went from wearing a t-shirt and shorts to slacks and a jacket. Brrrrrr! The days have been mostly cold, cloudy and wet. Today it's brilliantly sunny, but the weatherman keeps mentioning the word "snow" in his forecast. It's not even fall yet! I missed snow while I was in Korea, but this is ridiculous.
Secondly, my mook encounters have gone waaaay down. I was driving into town with my mother yesterday, and I only cursed once in the hour-long drive. In Korea, it'd be every minute or so. The mooks here are just as mookish, there're just fewer of them, that's all.
I was climbing up a hill, and just over the rise a tractor-trailer had pulled to the side of the road. His ass was still sticking out, though. The highway had just gone from three lanes to two, and this jackass had just cut that in half.
Fucking mook!
Third, I'm no longer living alone, with the luxury of doing what I want when I want. I'm staying with my folks until the next contract comes through. They've got a nice place, and it's a hell of a lot more comfy than a one-room con-apt in Cheongju, but sometimes the restrictions get a little confining.
I can no longer strut around nude, for instance.
Oh well. Adjustments have to be made everywhere I guess.
The big news, of course, is about my new job.
I don't have one.
I was all excited about being offered a job in England. It was pretty sweet. Fantastic money and extras like a car and a 'puter, not to mention being able to take advantage of life on the European continent, a particular dream of mine.
The post was supposedly the tutor to a family of Italians living just outside of London, and for about a month, preparations went well.
I was corresponding with the "employer" and his "lawyer," and they were asking me for all kinds of documents, and I was sending pictures and forms and so on.
They even sent me pictures of the family. It had a lot of authenticity to it.
And then they (or was it he? maybe it was a single person) proved themselves to be villains.
They asked me for money.
The lawyer claimed that I had to show that I as able to support myself in country until the first paycheck kicked in. He wanted me to send him about $1,200. Both he and the "employer" said it would be safe, and I could trust them, and they were so looking forward to my coming over, and the children were really excited and blah blah, blah!
I knew something was fishy, so I checked the requirements for UK work visas on-line, and told them that it looked like sending them money was unneccessary.
I so wanted to believe the job was legitimate.
But the "lawyer" kept insisting that I had to send them some dough. I had let Flint know about what was transpiring, and he went and called the British Embassy for confirmation about all this. They came back with the statement that dashed all my dreams. This was definitely a scam. Any time someone asks you to send them money, it's a scam.
Well, the disappointment was... well, I can't say just how bad it was. You can probably guess.
I turned my correspondence over to the police, and maybe they'll be able to do something, but... These cockroaches have plenty of ways of concealing themselves, and are pretty hard to track down and squash.
Sigh.
A few days after I had spoken to the police, somebody called me, asking if I was going to send the money. I told them no, and they said, "so I'm going to cancel the application?" I said yes. "I'm not sending you any money." This person had a kind of accent, thick and middle-European? They muttered someting unintelligible and hung up.
And that's the last I've heard from them.
All the time I was in Korea, I'd heard a lot of horror stories. Flint has recalled some hair-raisers in this very blog.
I'd only been badly cheated a couple of times. A recruiter kept my return airfare once, and a hagwon owner was late paying me. I never did get that airfare back, and I did a runner from that hagwon as soon as I got all my money. Being aware of all these things made me wary, and saved me from an expensive lesson at the hands of this latest scam artist.
So now I'm back on the unemployment line, looking for another contract... somewhere.
Sigh.