August 20, 2018
My Girl Kaylee
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She doesn't speak much English and I'd rather she have better math and computer skills but she's an absolutely amazing employee and I'm glad to have her.
Monday, while I was off doing other things, she took a bus 15km one way to the Public Security Bureau Exit & Entry Administration to pick up my passport with my newly updated Residence Permit (which much to my massive annoyance has been updated from the date I turned it in rather than updated from when the previous one would have expired), and 15km back to deliver it to me, bought my airline ticket to Beijing, acquired and delivered replacement screws for the self-loosening ones that used to be on the backplate of my laptop, went to my apartment to let Sam the Bike Mechanic pick up my bike to do a final Mystery Noise Check before disassembly, and started the process of finding out for a friend of mine how much it costs to buy advertising on the city buses.
She arranges for my cleaning lady (who should come in way more often than she does) to come in. She does most of my online shopping. She picks up and sends my mail. She takes my dry cleaning and anything that needs mending that can't be done by the tailor downstairs. She pays my accountant, my landlord, my water bill. Basically, everything that Andrea does for Miranda Priestly in the Devil Wears Prada only without the Prada wearing or the crazy hours.
Actually, the hours are pretty crazy.
According to our contract, she's obligated to me for "up to 40 hours per week" of self organized flex time. Having just taken a glance at another weekly report that shows less than 4 hours, I'm reasonably certain that she rarely hits 40 hours a month working for me. Now, she does have two other jobs. Actual part time jobs that admit to being part time as opposed to salaried full time jobs that don't especially care where she is or when she does things and which barely give her anything to do.
Being as I'm in the final stages of planning to run away for most of the next 5 months, I thought it would be a good idea to bring up that her current contract is about to expire and that we needed to talk about extending it. About a raise in case she was feeling the pinch from ongoing increase in cost of living. Stuff like that.
And here's where Kaylee's being amazing comes in. She feels bad about the fact that I pay her and then, quite often, don't give her any work. She feels like she's taking advantage of me. In the interests of fairness, she thought I should give her less money and let her officially look for a full time job somewhere else.
Yeah. No.
Instead I've gone and talked to a bunch of my local friends. We've come up with a rate that's fair for all parties with half going to Kaylee and half going to me and I'm going to loan her out. This was already sort of going on in an unofficial manner but we'll make it official. Cause even if she doesn't see it the way I do, she's useful and helpful and allows me to be able to run off and run away.
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