post removed by author who intends to remove himself from internet forums hopefully forever.
Anna is a former boss of mine and a real stand-up honey. One of the nicest women I’ve ever met. She can be a bit of a scatterbrain, but she’s not usually tardy in the way you describe. She hasn’t worked at Sinorama for quite a while though, I don’t think – not since Jason Hu became the invisible mayor of Taichung. She works for him now.
Hi Sandman,
I have no doubt of what you say about Anna. It often is a problem for me to decide if I should say anything because oftentimes the person I criticise may well be a fine person. As you say Anna is.
But…when you look at it through my freelaners eyes it looked like I was being jerked around. It didn’t just “look” that way, it was that way.
It is simply a difference of perspectives, both are “true” in their own ways.
take care,
Brian
[quote]But…when you look at it through my freelaners eyes it looked like I was being jerked around. It didn’t just “look” that way, it was that way.
[/quote]
No question, and normally your post wouldn’t have raised my eyebrows at all – par for the course for local publications. It was just your mention of Anna as the perpetrator that surprised me, as it seems out of character, from what I remember of her professional attributes.
brian: anna retired now, she works in Taichung as special asst to Jason Who. Who? Hu!
Sandman is exactly right, she is a class act.
Other than that, all mags screw freelancers daily! Don’t quit yr day job.
I am sorry I offended. The post has been removed and the whole thing serves to remind me of my New Years vow to avoid internet chat rooms.
It is interesting to join a thread that has been gutted, thus having to guess at what the hell is going on…but what I do seem to see is this: a person’s personal character outside the workplace can be different from that of his behavior on the job.
My feeling is that if you are working, how “swell” you are is meaningless. I have worked with people who were great people outside the office but were hopeless incompetents at work.
Ah well, that’s what happens when a thread is gutted. In fact, my response was based precisely on the fact that during the 8 years I worked for Anna, she was anything but incompetent, hence my surprise at Brian’s original post.
Maybe I should have added “vice-versa”?
Wolf, Sandman,
I will kind of answer you two’s “unasked question” about why I deleated the origninal post. I will answer you two because Wolf I kind of “know” in a cyberspace way (he and I talked quite a bit about the demise of the Times) and Sandman cause you seem pretty reasonable.
So, the reason was I found my mailbox full of messages saying in essence “how could you pick on poor dear Anna”. I stand by my facts and as I told the one person I bothered to answer the fact that Anna is:
great person to those she knows
and suffering from cancer
does not change the facts of my experience with her and Sinorama nor my conclusions. But being fed up with many of the nitwits who haunt this section of “slobber-space” I simply apologized and cut out the post.
Note: the “nitwits” I refer to are not “cool” people like us.
Anyway the post made no difference, Sinorama is still run the same way it has been in the past.
One final comment I would make is somebody mentioned “freelancers always get treated like that”.
Not exactly true for me. I have had outstanding luck with Don Shiripio at Topics (the AmCham magazine) and with Robert Green at Taiwan Review. They are quick to reply, they give straightforward answers (for example a few weeks ago Robert Green said “thanks but no thanks” to a piece I sent along, which was fine. I sold it elsewhere today in fact.)
I of course would not dare, in a million years, draw a conclusion regarding “cultural differences” from my experience. I wouldn’t want my mailbox to explode again.
You too take care, the rest of the fools drop dead.
Brian
…until you misspelled Mr. Shapiro’s name, that is… 
and the magazine he runs is called TROPICS, no?
No.