About five minutes after I’ve finished doing the copying (which involved taking the papers over to the copier and handing them to a secretary so that I wouldn’t damage The Machine with my total lack of copying machine -fu) I’m sitting at a table in the hotel lobby collating and stapling and generally being in a grumpy mood about it.

Then the coach of the Chinese National Team came over “do you know when the such-and-such a schedule is going to be ready?”

“It’s the third set of documents I’m supposed to be collating cause nobody has any translation tasks for the translator”

“Oh.”

And he sits down and starts collating documents with me.

He could do it because everyone knew he was a personage instead of a mere person.

By and large, however, whenever I’ve got Chinese coworkers, the important people never ever let the random outsiders see them performing actual work even when the work that they are carefully not letting outsiders see them do is work that they won’t let us plebes do.

I’ve never actually heard of any of the 师傅 asking for contact information of customers. Maybe some stores do that to keep a customer list or something. Or maybe he was just looking for a date. Did he ever call?

Thanks for sharing your experiences! Your posts are always interesting to read.

I’m chinese & I visited Hefei two weeks ago. I went to a semi-upper class hair salon like the one you worked in. The 师傅 who permed my hair asked me for my contact info (& washed my hair too), so I gave him my email address. Is it common for them to ask female customers that?

Funny how smaller things are different.

I asked Mr. Zheng about the typical training schedule once, and his response was that it takes anywhere between two weeks and two months and is based on how quick the new little brother or sister learns. The other employees help out with the training, but it is really up to the new employee to make the most of it, since he does not start getting paid until training is completed.