Someone asked me to answer this as a fish tanks question. It doesn’t look like the fish kind of tank, but if it is, then I imagine the tank owner will remove himself from the vicinity as quickly as possible on seeing the C4s, whatever they are. If there are irreplaceable fish inside he might try to net them and carry them away in a carrier bag with water. For sure he or she will look for a replacement aquarium quickly. Obviously it’s not a situation any fishkeeper hopes for.
Supplementary question
A Quoran called Patrick Zhong then replied to the above with the question “Please inform, how do you drive a fish tank?”.
I was not even able to upload this answer someone talking to me on Quora, whose name is Alberto. I will put it here and you’ll be able to work out from the context what he was saying. Anyone wishing to comment is welcome, I only censor for spam and not politics. It is just as well I have my own outlet and am not fully in thrall to other people’s sites and their rules.
Some historical examples
I picked out the Phoenicians as an example because I thought that was your best argument out of them. Saying that the Greeks were educated by Egyptians is rather silly. All of these big libraries which were in due course destroyed by the Moors you so idolise were Graeco-Roman. They were not originally Egyptian, as the Ptolemaic line was totally subordinate to Graeco-Roman power.
Egyptians came under the influence of Semitic tribes, among others the Hebrews and Phoenicians, and it was the Akkadians who brought literacy to Sumeria, so that we don’t even really know much about the original Sumerian language.
That all aside, I would like to point out a certain inconsistency in your arguments.
Inconsistency in your arguments
You are arguing that earlier cultures have been culturally more rich and civilised than invading cultures. There has been a tendency in history for advanced civilisations to become complacent and then the barbarians invade them. You reference the Vikings, ok, let’s take the vikings. Scandinavia was the “officina gentium aut certe velut vagina nationum“ as Jordanes wisely if naughtily puts it. From its territories the kingdoms and empires of all medieval Europe sprang, from Spain to Russia. And what happened? They became the most civilised parts of the world because they became economically relatively comfortable. Their homelands are among the highest HDIs in the whole world. So much for barbarians.
Obviously we can’t just leave these people on the street…
Now it is others coming in and destroying that. People who may have once been great repositories of culture but who lost it and now in many cases are barely literate. They come in many cases not so much to work as to receive gifts of houses and benefits. We know that because here in Poland, where the benefits even for Poles are meagre, and you need to work, we are not seeing them. Other than as a transit space to Germany and other Frankish and Visigothic and Viking kingdoms where they expect to find a copious social safety net. They even flock on the shores of France to enter the UK via dinghies just for a marginally more generous social crib.
And there’s you, taking the side of the fine culture when it’s Vikings like me invading but when it’s Vikings like me who have the fine culture, and those who long ago forgot their culture are invading as Barbarians, then that’s wrong.
You are like the Kali figure in Sienkiewicz’s trilogy. The epitome of double standards. Poles talk about “Kali’s Law”. That basically means it’s one law for me and another for you.
You talk about 40 years of learning as if it were some huge punishment, but the thing about a polyglot is that he or she has that as a hobby. Not many folk get paid for it. It relaxes them and fascinates them to learn languages and so they do it. The fact that some spend 40 years indulging this love is really no more remarkable than someone who spent 40 years over a lovely big garden.
More of less or less of more?
Yes, some people do have bookshelves a bit like this…
Whether it really is forty years or more or less depends on intensity of learning, committed time in an average week, choice of methods, choice of materials, how efficient the learner is at getting a lot of mileage from a vocabulary of only, say 2,000 words, and if the learner has chosen a lot of similar languages and all of them are similar to his native tongue, or if a person has chosen languages with little common grammar and few common lexemes, and even a very different phonology and alphabet to his or her own.
By the numbers
The minimum time to get to 20 lots of 2000 words (40,000 words) with a reasonable cover of 20 not totally dissimilar grammars is something like 4,000 hours, although it could be with more efficiency done in closer to 3,200 hours. Let’s go with the 4,000 and allow the learner a thousand hours of learning time a year. What’s the result? Just four years. You’re not getting massive fluency but a solid base in 20 similar languages. On the other hand another person might work leisurely and start at about the age of 14 when the bug often hits and suddenly at age 90 die of natural causes on a tricky piece of Javanese polite form. That’s 76 years of learning. Let’s take the average of 76 years and 4 years and we get your 40 years, so it’s a perfectly reasonable estimate, but you see how the mileage can vary.
There’s a lot of people writing answers to this, but presumably they must have a salient piece of information which I don’t, namely “where are you?”.
Jurisdiction stranger than fiction
Contrary to popular belief, there are lots of different jurisdictions in the world, and even in the English-speaking world. Depending on where you are and the kind of contract you signed, the nature of the work and projects, etc, you might have a right to leave or you might not.
So the only wisdom I can give, other than go to an actual lawyer in your locality, and preferably not to one who wants your boss’s business, is to reconsider your situation, especially after a good night’s sleep.
A boss giving a subordinate a right telling off. (Subordinate’s eye view).
Praxis makes perfectum
Instead of a legal argument, I want to give you a practical argument. You were, you say, “humiliated” in front of everyone in the office. I think what is unsaid here are the following salient details:
Did you do something that deserved criticism? If so, then accept the criticism, and just say to the boss something like “I know I deserved the criticism, and ought to have done this and that instead of that and this, however, I looked through all the management textbooks I could find and all of them say that a good manager avoids disciplining an employee in public. Do you therefore accept that this was also a mistake on your part?”
You need hands to hold a brand-new job down
If the manager is at least willing to admit they made a mistake as well as you, then I think you shake hands and say, “Ok, we both made a mistake, we both will go back and get on with business as usual.” This is the best outcome as long as your reasons for working with the company in the first place and their reasons to have hired you are still true and aligned.
It takes a certain maturity to be able to do this. If you and the manager can, then for sure you can both be proud of yourself and for sure the rest of the team will find it easier to rehabilitate their view of both of you also.
“Humiliation” can be a rite of passage in certain groups. I remember once I called into one radio shock-jock and got torn into pieces and when I looked in the skype chat where the fans were listening and discussing live, instead of the expected mockery I was reading celebration about a new member of the in-crowd (me) who had got “boyed off (Tommy) Boyd”! Did you check if this is the culture here? If so, you may as well go with the culture. It is hard to change cultures single-handedly, and as long as all it is is a little humiliation, no biggy. It can be in fact very good for people to have their ego taken down every so often.
If you didn’t do anything that deserved criticism, then say to the manager that criticism when undeserved is as far as you are concerned constructive dismissal (this is a term worth looking up on Wikipedia, and finding out if it applies in your jurisdiction and HOW it applies, and here again you need a local lawyer and not Quorans who might know very well how it is in New Zealand or Oregon, but this will be of little help if you are in Dubai or St Neots.) If you are in luck then not only can you leave but also you can claim compensation as if you had been sacked.
Still not as good as shaking hands (edit: Covid-permitting) and getting back to the job, though.
Radix malorum est gravitas
I think the real answer, my friend, is blowing in the direction of developing of a thicker skin, less fragile ego, and a more refined sense of fun, even at one’s own expense. People with these qualities have more success. Gravitas is great, but it has its limits. “Face without jokes is dead”, as the Apostle James didn’t say, but might have done if he had been writing a coaching booklet rather than an Epistle General to the early Church.
And now, let’s make a little prophesy, shall we? Let’s say you do flounce off because this manager got you upset whether or not you deserved it. Let’s say you go to a new company. Now let’s say that in a few months or years, someone who was in the room watching you get owned that day gets hired. They don’t want you up above them, and nor do a couple of others, so as they make their friends and alliances in the new place, one day they impart the information about how you reacted to public criticism in your old place, and as soon as someone wants you out of the way of their own career path, they will arrange for the self-same thing to happen again, and the history book on the shelf will once again be repeating itself, and you will once again find yourself flushing your career down the Waterloo.
Topinambur – grown in Poland, or: “the new Jerusalem artichoke”.
If someone doesn’t like tasty food and pretty women, easy-going, polite and positive people with a good sense of humour plus great sights of various kinds, from the historical to the futuristic, from the urban to the most rural landscapes, and if someone likes to overpay for their purchases, then such a person ought not to visit Poland.
If someone likes to criticise a nation for being proud about its history and independent-minded, if someone wants to mock someone else’s religion, or behave in an anti-social manner while mouthing off about how rude the locals are for not having identical habits and manners as in their country of origin, well I think such a person won’t enjoy Poland much either. And Poland certainly won’t enjoy them. Continue reading “Why should I never visit Poland?”→
