Micah Sittig

After many years of silence and spending most of my online time on Youtube, Facebook and Reddit, I'm peeking my head out to say that I've moved back to California, Ojai specifically. I'm married with three daughters, the oldest being in high school now. For work I'm teaching science and math at the Ojai Valley School, where I live with my family in faculty housing.

Also wanted to share that I've been playing a fun little game recently called Wordle. It's an online word puzzle game that you can only play once a day, so it gives me something to look forward to but doesn't take too much of my time. Here is a screenshot of today's (spoiler!) puzzle:

Another game I've been playing quite a bit the last few years is Minecraft. In terms of the user experience it reminds me of playing Lego with my siblings when we were younger; constructive, creative and collaborative. I've been playing less the last couple years because it really is a timesink, but it was fun when I had the time.

This past week I've gone through a long and tortuous journey, getting back an ATM card that I left in a grocery store ATM. Read on for the sordid details.

Two weekends ago I was sent by my school to an IB workshop in Singapore. The night before I left, I dropped by the grocery store to shop for a few last-minute purchases and to withdraw some cash from the Bank of Communications ATM in the lobby using my Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) debit card. The plan was to take cash with me to Singapore, and leave the debit card home with Jodi in case she needed more cash.

Later that night as I finished packing my things, I opened my wallet to take out the debit card and found that it wasn't there. I immediately recognized that I had left it in the supermarket ATM after withdrawing the cash. I told Jodi, scrapped together as much cash to leave behind as I could, and made plans for the next morning.

At the airport, I called the ICBC customer service hotline and froze my account. I confirmed that the balance was correct, and was assured by the customer service representative that I could re-activate my card at any ICBC branch, including subway branches, once I had retrieved my card from the ATM. An hour later I was on a flight to Singapore for a four-day stay.

When I got back, I visited the ICBC branch near my school to try and withdraw some cash with my passport. No luck: no cash would be forthcoming without the card. The best they could do was print out a piece of paper with my bank account information that would prove the card belonged to my passport number. I was getting nervous because it was the beginning of the month and various things were coming due: rent, credit card bill, various utility bills, etc.

The next step was to find the card. I called the hotline for Bank of Communications and a helpful woman pointed me to the Xintan Rd branch of BoC as being responsible for this particular ATM. Discouragingly, she told me that cards like mine were usually kept for 4 days at the maximum--my trip had been exactly four days long--but that there was a chance mine was still there. I called the branch the next morning and was able to confirm that my card was probably in their possession, so in the afternoon I left work 30 minutes early and arrived at the bank 10 minutes before closing time. Using the printout from ICBC and my passport, I was able to claim my card. Being ever a scientist, I did not wait to activate the card before trying it at the ATM of the same branch where it was promptly confiscated for being frozen, necessitating another trip to the window for retrieval.

The afternoon of the next day, I took my passport to the ICBC branch in the Xujiahui subway station expecting a quick activation and finally being able to withdraw some cash. But no, the tellers were unable to activate my card because it had no personal information attached to it; this account was opened for me by my second employer in Shanghai back in 2006, and they had not given my phone number or address to the bank. The bank branch's standard procedure for unlocking frozen cards was to confirm phone number and address, and since my card did not have this information teller would require me to go to the bank where my account was opened, the central branch in Pudong, and "confirm my information". To me this was ludicrous: if my account had no personal information attached to it, how would the other branch even be able to confirm my info any better than this branch? Besides, the most important piece of personal information, my passport number, was attached to the account, and would be easily confirmable with my physical passport.

Without leaving the desk, I called the service number for ICBC and talked to a customer service representative. I hoped that the service rep would be able to guide the teller through unlocking my card without requiring a trip to Pudong. But even after handing the phone over to the teller twice and even escalating to a manager, the people behind the service number were not able to wrap theri heads around and solve this problem.

Finally, while I was busy on my phone, one of the tellers at the bank branch got on the desk landline to her boss at ICBC. After consulting with the boss, she received authorization to release my card without confirming my personal data. After a few simple questions about my last transactions, she handed the card off to another teller who worked on the computer for a few minutes and unfroze the account. There was a pause because the bank account is under my complete name, including middle names, and the input field was not long enough so my account name has always been SITTIGMICAHSTEVENSTU with a missing ART at the end, which is obvious if you are looking at my passport. But this was quickly resolved without my assistance and the card came back to me, ready to use. At some point, I still need to make a trip over to Pudong to enter my personal details into the ICBC computer system.

So it took a tense hour or so of negotiation between me, the two tellers, a security guard, the customer service rep, and her manager, but we were finally able to get the job done. Big thanks to Jodi for being a sport and taking care of the girls while I hashed this out. Hopefully this information is interesting or useful to somebody.

Tonight I went to a dance charity event put together by WFLMS students with performances by dance clubs from seven other schools in Shanghai, all for sending students/funds to the Inner Mongolia tree-planting trip this year. After a slow start (sexy dancing? er), Nanmo Middle/High School really turned it up a notch and the rest of the show was awesome. There was even locking, and one dubstep number. Very nice evening, totally worth the price of admission and for a good cause.

The students even prepared an impressive promotional video, filmed in the WFLMS dance room, and put it on Youku:

So far this summer I've had one week-long class on Research in Teaching & Learning. It's nice being in the student's seat again; the change in perspective always lets me see new things about my teaching.

If you're interested in being a part of another possible University of Oklahoma Masters in Education cohort at SMIC School in Shanghai (open to anybody, not just school faculty) please get in contact with me: msittig@gmail.com

This is a test of my new Blosxom weblog (the old is new!). I'm getting tired of Blogger being GFWed, and having more reasons to let local users without VPNs or SSH tunnels read my weblog. For the next couple hours I'll be updating templates, customizing RSS feeds, installing plugins, and so on. Happy hacking to me!

Today I found a couple of these in my mailbox downstairs:

It's an ad for a VPN to get around the Chinese government's "Great Firewall" (GFW) that blocks many foreign websites used by dissidents, like Youtube, Face and Twitter. This is the first time I've seen offline advertising for a service like this, and I'm guessing that our building was targeted because our neighborhood has a high concentration of foreign nationals. This type of ad goes right along with the majority of ads my mailbox sees, which is illegal satellite dish ads, illegal moving companies, and legal(!) housecleaning referral services.

At work today I came back to find a new scarf on my desk. Turns out to be a gift from the union that was organized at my work a week or two before the Chinese New Year break, which I joined. Glancing through my e-mail I saw that, of the 9 teachers in my department, only three of us joined: myself, and the other two local teachers. I wonder if the social science department had a higher subscription rate.

This morning Jodi went to the 1st Maternity Hospital near the former Expo site and got her first ultrasound. It was 3-D: two dimensions plus time, so basically a movie. I think she put a still up on her 微博, like a Chinese Twitter but with pictures, video and censorship. The point of this piece of news being that, yes, we're having a third (and, uh, last), and that it cost RMB 300 to get the the ultrasound movie burned to a CD, which is RMB 100 more than last time, proving that inflation is everywhere.

Also, I'm coaching soccer this season. I volunteered to help coach the the boys team but so many guys tried out that they formed a JV team as well and let me take it alone. The guys are super respectful and proactive so coaching them is great fun. I joined in a drill today and my old cleats breathed their last; the plastic must have dried out over the past few years that I haven't played so the sole cracked and a couple cleats broke off. I'm not sure our budget can cover anything nice right now. I'll probably get something basic to replace them.

We ran around to a couple places looking at e-bikes today, but came home with only some groceries and a tummy full of Sbarros and Hunanese food. The main problem is that we really want a solid bike with a quality child-seat on the back. The problem is that the seats we scoped out online all seem to fit bicycles and bicycle-style e-bikes only, and larger e-bikes don't have solid structures on the back that could support a toddler in a child-seat. Tomorrow we're going to make one more trip to Carrefour and then decide. If it comes down to it, we may just buy the bike we like and have the local e-/motobike shop jimmy-rig the seat onto the bike using some solid bars and bolts.

This afternoon I went to Anne Sommer's excellent talk on the history of housing rights in post-liberation Shanghai, and took some brief notes. Sommers is a lawyer whose frustration at the difficulties of buying an old home in Shanghai lead her to research the history of housing rights in the city and how they stand in the way of preserving its cultural heritage. I'd like to point out the "Two Ironies and One Tragedy" (you know you've been in China too long when…) of the event:

• Sommers envisioned, and the audience bemoaned with her, a future when living in a restored Concession-era house would only be fate of the "mega-rich". Ironically, the audience at the talk wasn't exactly the bottom of Shanghai's barrel.

• The talk was held in the Puli Hotel, a "new Urban Resort Concept that blends the immediacy and convenience of being in Shanghai’s most central location with the quiet, emotional indulgences of a peaceful, luxurious resort". Ironically, according to Google Earth, as late as the year 2000 the site of this hotel was occupied by what appears to be traditional Shanghai lane houses. See Google's satellite imagery below.
• The tragedy, which Sommers alluded to at the conclusion of the Q&A session but didn't fully capture, is not that the material evidence of the concession era is being hoarded in the hands of the elite and crushed under the bulldozers of the big developers, but that the unique Shanghainese urban culture that thrived in the lanes and art-deco apartments is disappearing as its environs are being destroyed. In my estimation, the best hope for the preservation of this culture is not the foreign professional class that attended the talk, but low-income young people who are willing to mold their lifestyles to the challenges posed by lane life, rather than those who would mold the neighborhoods to fit their lifestyle.

That said, I learned quite a bit from the talk and I hope that it does spur some grass-roots efforts at stopping the demolition of Shanghai popular heritage.

(Note to self. People I recognized at the talk: Sue Anne Tay, Peter Hibbard, Tess Johnston, Neale McGoldrick, Lisa Movius.)

Now that I’m in Beijing I often wonder if it’s possible to build a strong educational programme in the imperial capital of guanxi. To counter guanxi, which is essentially about leveraging one’s personal network, I thought it best at Peking University High School to emphasize process over people. So we instituted a policy that to enter the International Division, students must enroll in a week-long admissions camp.

This is a really over-the-top (in a great way) method for dealing with high school admissions. Somebody on Google Reader tried to defend guanxi in contexts other than this article, but the way I see it guanxi is a transaction that benefits some parties and has negative externatlities for many more others. For me, then, it's a no go.