Negativism

I had a very tough working day today. So many things went wrong.

It started with the English class with the "arbeitsamt" people - unemployed people who are entitled to both social benefits and free English classes at my company. They are obliged to go to school everyday and as part of their curriculum, we are required to have a 1.5-hour class with them everyday. The topics should be relevant to to helping them to increase their chances of getting a job.

Today was my turn and following the syllabus, I did an article about "ways to prepare yourself for a job interview". The two classes I had were so listless and uninterested in the article. I broke the group up into 3 smaller groups and told them to read through the article and each group would have to summarize one page of the article and explain the contents to the rest of the group.

They did the first assignment, but other than that, there was hardly any discussion! Its like I kept seeing faces like the "this is so boring and I´d rather not being doing this" type of look. With one group, I tried to do a vocabulary game that involved trying to make as many words from a long word". Eg. for a word like conscientious - they can make words like noun, incest etc. I actually thought this would be quite interesting to expand their vocabulary, but after two words, one person from the group actually said "this game is not interesting".

I know that I shouldn´t take it personally, but boy! Was I pissed! Its like of course you want to have an interesting class everytime, but its impossible. Anybody who´s ever been a student would know that studying involves hard work. And if that means going through the ups and downs of learning a language, then so be it! I´m sure he didn´t mean it in a bad way, but it was so frustrating to be at the receiving end of it.

And even before that they were complaining all the time about the "arbeitsamt" - unemployment agency. Things like the jobs they offer are crap, salaries are low etc. I felt like telling them at least they are getting money while being unemployed from the agency. Countries like Singapore doesn´t even give the unemployed any money! No doubt that employment rates in Singapore are way better than in Germany, but still! I felt really frustrated at the entire negative discussion. Of course it´d have been great if I could simple say, "Guess what. Even when you are unemployed, God still loves you and He still has a plan and a purpose for your life. You´re no less significant just because you´re out of job in this season of your life". But work being work, I dared not overstep the line of professionalism by bringing in religion.

To make matters worse, while I was on my way to my company for my class, my bus didn´t arrive! The bus-stop where I usually go to is under renovation and I had to walk to a "make-shift" bus-stop to wait for the bus. However, when I looked at the signboard at the make-shift bus-stop, I realized that my bus-number wasn´t even at this bus-stop! I panicked but decided to run down to the next bus-stop in the hope that the bus would stop there. However, my bus-number was not reflected on that bus-stop either! I ended up calling my father-in-law to pick me up from the bus-stop and all this time, I was only left with 15 mins to get to the company.

My FIL came in 10 mins and it turned out that I was punctual for my class! However, I had already called the person-in-charge to inform my class that I would be 5-10mins late for my class and most of them came 10mins anyways. Boy, today was simply a day when I just had to tell myself that no matter how bad it was, I´m still one day closer to Heaven and on the right path with God! Amen!