Treading Water - Shanghai Style
Today it is humid and sticky and I have been treading water in many different ways.
I have been treading water with regards to editing the school footage, because SonicMyDVD kept on crashing and the interface is so bad that it doesn’t let you save regularly in an intuitive way. You have to save it twice in a very cumbersome and deliberate manner. So, I had to backtrack 30 minutes on about 3 or 4 occasions. Eventually, I got into a riff of saving every 3 minutes.
I have been treading water when it comes to applying for a credit card in China. It is not just a question of asking and being told no. There are also the extra steps of the getting to the bank, queuing up and laboriously trying to understand and be understood. These add at least 30 minutes on to each leg. ICBC said no. HSBC said no. BOC said come back tomorrow or go to HSBC. 3 legs and 3 refusals.
The Canon repair centre also made me tread water by wasting my time as I went to collect my video camera before it was ready. This was a case of not making myself understood or understanding what was being said on the telephone. The clerk would not give me a straight answer when I insisted that the camera needed to be fixed before I go to England in July.
If I had completed the day without anything to show for my labours then I would be feeling very peeved at this moment, but there was a little relief in the end. The video footage was edited. I need to do a little more at school, although I did as much as was planned. I have got to grips with using Macromedia Captivate to create Flash tutorials for Moodle and other software tools. The BOC eventually caved in and gave me an application form and I have just come back from a relaxing evening with Jenny at Chalon, Itokin feasting on Japanese food.
Normally, the metaphor of treading water suggests a large amont of effort is being exerted with nothing to show for it. Today after sunset, I managed to mix up my metaphors and partly turn them on their head by treading all the way from home to Jenny’s shop in 20 minutes flat. I marched along Shanxi Nan Lu listening to Melt-Banana in triumphant mood, sweating copious quantities of water on my back in the mid June heat.
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