VIEWER MAIL!!

In a recent post located below entitled, “Sticking It to the Man,” I talk about how I paid a “suspect” power bill with a whole lot of jiao. Since posting I’ve received a veritable flood of comments (4). But one stuck out the most which you can read uneditted as follows:

“Dude, 225 US dollars for a year’s bill, I hope your parents didn’t have to mortgage the house! This same kind of thing happened to me, I got stuck with a $300 cell phone bill for 10 hours of international calls, those bastard phone people! They didn’t even have the common decency to have bills hand-delivered to me twice daily by the CEO. But I’m such a BADASS I showed them, I sent 33,333.333 anthrax-laden checks for 0.9 cents (like you see at gas stations) each. 46 people died as a result, it was AWESOME. You bill me? I DON’T THINK SO! Ok I made that up, I’m not really a retarded douchebag asshole who can’t handle paying a bill I quite obviously earned.” jeebs | 08.01.05 - 3:39 pm |

I was quite taken aback by the vituberative tone of his comment so I went back to reread my post to see where it might have sprang from. It was then that I realized that in order to spare my school’s already “sterling” reputation I left out a lot of important information that would have clarified, for people like Jeebs, why I chose to pay the bill the way I did. So to show all you out there that internet super-stardom has not gone to my head like it has with others (John Pasden at Sinosplice…Feel my sting!!) I have decided to reply to this comment personally. I would have sent Jeebs a private email but he chose to leave his comment anonymously (like a man) and under, what I suspect is, a pseudonym (equaly manly). So please enjoy my open letter to Jeebs explaining why I paid my utilities bill with a lot of jiao.

Dear Jeebs (if that is your real name),

Thank you so much for your sarcastic and belittling comment. You are obviously a man of high moral standards and integrity. However, allow me an attempt to explain why I paid this bill in such a manner. Perhaps I didn’t make it obvious enough in the original post but the bill you say I, “quite obviously earned” is something of an untruth. Unbeknownst to the heads of the university I teach at (and, believe you me, it was a hard job to get on account of my “retardation”) the building managers of the teachers’ residence building (where the teachers live) have an unsavory practice of housing themselves, their cronies, and their mistresses in the vacant rooms that are reserved for and to be used by the university’s teaching staff. The building managers and their friends/family/fuck buddies use these apartments (conveniently located next to, across from or adjoining the foreign teachers’ residences) as a sort of “clubhouse home away from home.” [Their actual homes are located a few floors beneath ours.]

So when the monthly electricity bills come to the building manager showing the amount of electricity that they “never used” because they are “forbidden” to reside in apartments reserved for teachers they doctor the books that show room by room usage and tack on their expenditures to the closest rooms to the ones they are “not” using which, unfortunately, happen to be mine and the other foreign teachers. As long as the money is accounted for the building managers’ superiors tend to not notice the fact that there are vacant rooms that are continually running up bills. All they see is the doctored room by room usage sheet that they create and submit. So Jeebs, I wasn’t just paying my bill, I was protecting their corrupt way of life by paying for electricity they used. Oh, and should I add that these same building managers make it a regular practice to enter into the rooms of the foreign teachers and steal things? I left that out as well because I didn’t feel the need to jeopardize this school’s already tentative reputation because of a couple corrupt rapscallions.

In conclusion, I hope you now understand that I wasn’t just inconveniencing some poor, innocent Chinese people for a gag and a giggle, but inconveniencing a couple of thieving, lying ne’er-do-wells who’s only purpose in life is to get as much as they can by doing as little as they can with no regard for the legality of their actions. I may be a, as you say, “retarded, douchebag asshole,” but I fight the good fight. Something, I would a assume, a self-righteous prick like yourself would appreciate.

Yours fondly and forever, Greg

P.S. You should try not to use “retard” or any of its derivatives as negative jibes against another person. People affected with mental handicaps like Down’s Syndrome already have an uphill battle to fight. Their struggle should not be our fodder for jokes. I would expect a man as beyond reproach as you to have chosen a more suitable word with which to degrade me. What are you? A fuckin’ retard?