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DON'T CALL US - WE'LL STALL YOU

Should you ever apply for a job in Brazil, or have any contact with enterprises with more than a couple of employees, learn to take with a large, high-blood-pressure-inducing pinch of salt their promises to call you. There’s no need to wait up anxiously by the phone, or rush out to buy a mobile in case they call when you’re out. When they say they’ll contact you, they’re just being nice - or trying to get rid of you.

I’ve just looked in my diary. On 19 June 2007 at oh nine hundred hours I went to a language school in nearby Sorocaba that I’d applied to for a teaching job, to do a test of English grammar and comprehension. This is supposed to be the school that offers the best pay and conditions available anywhere in the region. I had to sign a paper agreeing to go through the whole recruitment rigmarole, the test, followed by an interview and finally a battery of psychometric evaluations (I bet those results make interesting reading. I imagine many a mental TEFL teacher stumbles at this hurdle...) I can only assume I must have also been signing the Brazilian equivalent of the Official Secrets Act, such has been the mystery that has shrouded my dealings with this shadowy outfit.

Having breezed through the test in, I suspect, record time (if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s breezing through things in English) I was informed that my paper would be sent to São Paulo for marking, where someone, who I’m now convinced doesn’t really exist, would call me to guide me through the rest of the recruitment process.

A month on and nobody had called. Being a proactive go-getter (and observing the tightness of my long-suffering wife, Show’s, lips), I resolved to call the Director of Studies and chide her about the dark in which I was being kept. “I’ll call São Paulo and ask them to call you,” she lied efficiently, probably blacklisting me as soon as she put the phone down for having the audacity to do an Oliver Twist on her. Also, her having to phone São Paulo to ask somebody to phone me would require that two different people make two distinct long-distance calls, thus reducing exponentially my chances of receiving any adequate feedback.

But maybe I’m being impatient - that was a mere nine weeks ago. In the meantime, I’ve been developing an enchanting facial tick whilst planning to start my own business offering immersion courses for a monthly subscription equivalent to a pre-pubescent child’s pocket money – I’ll be running at a loss, but once I’ve put every other school out of business, I’ll be king of the castle, and they’ll be dirty rascals. And if anybody from the schools phones me to complain, I’ll just tell them I’ll call them back. And then I won’t. Ha ha! That’ll show ‘em...

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