THE NINJA:

WEIRD SCIENCE

By profession and apart from thinking of myself as some kind of writer — I’m an English teacher. Currently working in a UK college, with private tuition to boost my income. While sometimes the monotony of paperwork and the rest of the bureaucratic machinations tires me, it earns my daily bread and I can’t complain, knowing I’m helping someone in their future careers (I think). For many years, though, I was an English tutor in Warsaw, the capital of Poland, where I taught the spoiled children of the country’s political class, as well as business English to the swathes of middle managers and office workers in what now seems to have been every corporate office in the city on the Vistula. During my time doing this, I met all kinds of people. Most of them, like everywhere, were decent, hardworking folks just trying to improve their lot in the rat race that is working in one of the biggest cities in eastern Europe. Some, though — and these are in the one percent of all the people I have ever taught — were the worst kind of lowlifes I’ve ever had the displeasure to associate myself with. Take Kim Jong Un, Nigel Farage and that Belfort guy who wrote The Wolf of Wall Street, blend ’em together like in the movie Weird Science and it still doesn’t come close in terms of the cretin I’m about to describe to you. This guy, in no uncertain terms, was a shyster to the tenth degree, plain and simple. Oozing arrogance from every moronic orifice he possessed, I only remained his tutor as I was on a good hourly rate (100zl/£20), good money in Poland for the time. ‘Marek’, as I shall call him for the purpose of this narrative — though this is not his real name — was a lawyer by profession and hired at the company as a legal consultant to oversee the firm’s — one of the biggest cooperative banks in the country — planned IPO (initial public offering). As part of his exulted demands, he got his own office (usually consultants were just assigned one in the hotdesking suite), lunch vouchers, three business English lesson weekly — each lasting 90 minutes, with yours truly — as well as, and this really takes the almighty piss, his own secretary. This is on top of the 30,000zl I’m guessing he was invoicing the poor accounts office every month for the pleasure of his solomonesque legal advice. I mean, come on! Who the fuck did this guy think he was, Henry Kissinger?

FIRST MEETING

So, there I was, introduced to Marek by the office manager Anna on his very first day:

“Mr. Nowak,” Anna said to him politely, introducing us to each other, “this is James.”

“So, you’re my new English teacher?” Marek asked me, holding out his hand for me to shake, his tone lazy, uppity.

So, you’re my new teacher, I thought to myself, realizing he appeared like the kind of guy who disposed of his language instructors like Donald Trump fired members of his administration (more about that topic in a later post): with impunity, even though it was years before Trump became president. I must have been a mind reader back then.

“I am,” I replied.

“Can you come with me, please?” he then said.

Who was I to argue? I’d just finished my scheduled lesson with the bank’s director, a lovely man who I’d taught for three years. I was to soon find out Mr. Director and Marek were like chalk and cheese, to my detriment.

He took me into his new ‘office’, a place only vacated by the assistant marketing manager two weeks before after he got a job at a rival bank.

“Please, sit down,” he ordered me like Don Draper from Mad Men.

But I was no Pete Campbell. I wouldn’t be his supplicant.

“Of course,” I answered, taking a seat.

“I’ll soon add my own personal touch to it,” he said as he glanced around at the bare walls. “Looks a bit sad, doesn’t it?”

“What does?” I asked.

“The place, the office.”

“Yeah,” I said, though I thought as an English tutor he was going to pull me up on it: “Yes,” I then added.

He pulled out his first-generation iPad from his briefcase with such pride on his face I thought it was a photo album of his kids’ lives.

“Just got to schedule our lessons,” he said, opening it. “Can you make Mondays and Wednesdays at 3 pm and Fridays at one?”

I took out the humble academic dairy I’d bought in Poundland for a quid in the UK the year before.

“Let me see,” I answered. “…I’m afraid not. Friday at one’s good, but I’m busy on Monday and Wednesday at the time you want.”

He looked disappointed. But I wouldn’t budge. I planned my day to make it logistically easier on myself. I always booked my lessons so that they were close by to each other, or at the least on the Warsaw Metro line, which saved a lot of time. I wasn’t going to traipse from the northern suburbs to Centrum (where the office was located) just for Henry Kissinger’s convenience.

“What about four?” he suggested then.

“On both days?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes,” I said, correcting him — I was his English teacher after all and wanted to establish the fact.

We agreed on the days and the hours. I wrote them in my diary.

“You should get one of these,” he commented after I put it away.

Fuck you, I thought. He probably knew I couldn’t afford one on my salary.

“I’m not mad on technology, to be honest with you, Marek,” I said.

“Each man to his own — do you know I learned that phrase off of my old teacher?”

“Was he American?” I asked. I’d heard enough ‘gonnas’ and ‘wannas’ and ‘shouldas’ during our ten minutes together to realize that. The use of the Yankee tautological preposition ‘off of’ really took the biscuit.

“How did you know?” he asked.

“I guess I’m lucky.”

HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES, NOW?!

We started our lessons, though I’d say forty percent of the time he’d cancel a few hours — and sometimes even a few minutes — before, which was all hunky-dory for me as the school I worked for had a 24-hour cancellation policy: anything cancelled within that time the tutors were paid for. When we did have lessons, however, it was a case of him teaching me rather than the other way around. He knew everything, or so he thought. He told me on only our second lesson, and this is no lie, that ‘he was a Polish Will Hunting because he was a polymath who spoke four languages and knew a lot about history and geography and science but that was where the similarity to Matt Damon’s character ended in the movie as Hunting wasn’t educated but he was’. Okay, he did speak four languages: Polish, English, Russian, and German, though I can only verify that he spoke his own and mine to any level of real fluency. He was unteachable, that was all, and I dreaded the 90-minutes of chat that were always one-way traffic and his soapbox to boast about his education and professional life.

I’d heard it all from the creep. Except I hadn’t. This was a cracker:

“You ever had a boss you didn’t like?” he asked me one lesson, a few weeks into our cooperation. The motherfucker was in a bad mood for some reason. I didn’t ask him why. I looked at him, not knowing what to say: “Well, have you?”

The question was off the cuff — we were supposed to be studying the Future Perfect Continuous tense.

“Yes,” I said.

“Why did you hate him?”

“Because he was a prick.” Marek sniggered at my remark.

“Why?”

What was this: Twenty Questions or the Spanish Inquisition?

“He was an Irishman from County Offaly who’d been my foreman when I was working as a trainee electrician as a teenager. He treated me like shit. Didn’t like me because my family was from Dublin. He was a Culchie, you see — it’s an Irish cultural thing that’s too complicated to explain.”

“What’s a Culchie?” he then asked.

I told him about Culchies and Jackeens and the rivalry between the two.

“Can we get back to the lesson, Marek?” I asked him politely.

“But first, how did you deal with him?”

“Deal with who?”

“Your boss?”

“I don’t understand?”

“How did you get him back, how did you get your revenge?”

“I didn’t.”

“That’s a shame,” Marek then said. “Know what you should’ve done to him?”

“No, what?” I asked, glancing at the screen on my mobile, trying to check the time.

“Do you know what I’d do… no, sorry, what I actually did?” Marek said, glee in his eyes as he spoke.

“No?”

Marek moved his chair closer to the desk, grinned, leaned over to me, and said:

“I was working at a law firm in Zoliborz about ten years ago, you know, doing my aplikacja adwokacka… Anyway, there was a lawyer there, my boss, a real asshole. Like your boss, only worse. Treated me like shit all the time. Photocopying all day. Proofreading. Filing documents. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Working weekends non-stop. Anyway, one day I’d had enough, and I planned my revenge.”

“And what did you do?”

“It was ingenious.”

“Go on?” I asked, hooked now.

NINJA ESCAPE

“There was a meeting scheduled in his office at nine in the morning, it was a Friday. I’d booked the day off but came in to see my plan through… You see, the clients were from overseas: bigshots from France who represented a Paris construction company building tower blocks in Warsaw. So, anyway, I go into his office ten minutes before I know the guests are about to arrive. Now his office is big, really big, with a mini-conference table in it. I’d eaten bigos the night before and drunk a few beers and my guts were really playing me up… Guess what I do?” he then said.

I sort of knew but I didn’t.

“What?

“I farted. I farted and I farted. What a stink. When I drop one they hang around forever.”

I wanted to congratulate him on the use of the phrasal verb hang around, but I didn’t want to disturb his flow.

“And what did you do then?” I asked.

“I got the hell out of there, of course — left the sweet scent for the kurwa and his French dogs.”

There was no limit to this man’s depravity. I laughed, though, because it was funny.

“Did you get caught? Did they see you on the way out?”

“No, I was like a Ninja… And the best of it was his secretary always started later on Fridays so they’d think he had farted himself.”

“Wonderful,” I replied as I glanced back to the worksheet we’d been working on, “now, Marek, ‘Will have been working’ and ‘Will have worked’, what’s the difference between those two tenses…?”