Today was supposed to be the day we decide what to do for the next year. The options are:
1) Finish negotiations with an already existing charity. Arrange accommodation, transport and teaching space for me, start immediately, and at some point visit England to fetch all the hardware, software and data needed to upgrade teaching from basic.
2) Strike out on our own. I go home to get my stuff, Jamal squeezes business types in Saudi for funding, and when we're both done, get back to Turkey. My preferred option.
3) Give up the whole thing as a bad idea.
But, seeing as this is not just the middle east where nothing runs on schedule, but Turkey, where all meetings are a delicate dance of finding out what the terms of a verbal contract even mean...we've still got no idea what we're doing.
I don't like uncertainty, and I've got a very bad habit in uncertain situations. I tend to pace up and down, imagining scenarios where everyone else is being the most incompetent assholes in the world. And me coming up with strategies to deal with them.
Unfortunately, if you could reason with an asshole, they wouldn't be an asshole, by definition. That's why, however charitable your view on human nature, the only way to deal with bullies is to bully them. You deal with obstructive bureaucrats by obstructing them. And you defeat trolls by humiliating them - though whether that's best done by ignoring them is another matter.
That's why shouting works when pleading doesn't. It's why you deflate pomposity with ridicule, not debate. It's why blackmail, an appeal to the least enlightened form of self-interest, works better than appeals to, well, enlightened self-interest.
But pacing and fuming only leads to more pacing and fuming.
Unless you're debating creationists, flat earthers, or Trump supporters in the real world, obviously. Swivel-eyed loons can't be de-programmed, only smashed.
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| Taking afternoon tea on the lawn. |
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