joenelson81

By Charlie

Last Monday was cold. It felt especially bad because I spent about 20 minutes waiting for the bus and another 30 minutes riding a bus with no heat. Here’s what the inside of the bus window looks like on a cold morning. And yes, all that ice is on the inside of the window.

My frosting continued on the 5-minute walk from the bus stop to the MIAT building.

As I arrived in my office, I greeted everyone with the usual “Sain batskaan uu?” And then I saw a chipper young white dude smiling at me from behind a computer.

I was disoriented from the cold and totally confused. “Sorry, but who the hell are you?”

“I’m Joe,” he said with an English accent. “I’m a volunteer here.” Meet Joe Nelson, e-mail handle: joenelson81.

After 15 minutes of Q&A, I began to understand this guy’s story. He’s a recent college graduate from London and Bristol. He’s an avid traveler who has backpacked through Africa, taught English in Poland and recently hopped around the Middle East. He paid 1,200 British Pounds for the privilege of volunteering for three months at MIAT. Some kind of British-Mongolian organization sorted out his job and found a Mongolian family for him to live with. Joe also had to buy his plane ticket from the UK to Mongolia on Aeroflot. He arrived at the crack of dawn last Saturday and was at his desk at 8 AM on Monday. He has absolutely no prior experience in aviation.

Joe is a great guy and hanging out with him was a highlight of my week. We both admitted to being very relieved to have found each other at MIAT. Joe arrived at MIAT exactly two months after my job began. In those two short months, I gained a raft of knowledge about how to survive at MIAT. Over the course of the week, I downloaded all of this knowledge and experience to Joe’s brain, which basically amounts to this:

• Our boss is a bad dude. Avoid him and you’ll be happier for it.
• There are many wonderful people at MIAT. Find those people and build relationships with them.
• Nobody cares what you do, so do whatever you want.
• Nobody cares when you come to work, so come whenever you want.
• Get over the idea of the 40-hour work week; there is no such thing in Mongolia.
• Find something that you like and do that.
• And if you don’t like it at MIAT, find something else to do.

Joe seemed to appreciate all of this advice. But he had just arrived in Mongolia and it was all conceptual and hard to absorb. Just as I had done, Joe made a sincere and earnest work plan that he submitted to the bosses. They pretended to read it and then pretended to approve it. I assured Joe that this exercise was totally meaningless. By the end of the week, he realized this for himself.

Halfway through his first day on the job, I told Joe to drop everything. The Boeing pilots wanted to visit the hangar to check the progress of a major inspection that was being done on their aircraft. The hangar is the coolest real estate in all of Mongolia, so I wanted Joe to see it. This was a good opportunity for Joe to see the good side of MIAT and to learn a little bit about ailerons, flaps and pitot tubes. After checking out the hangar, we visited the MIAT bone yard and I photographed Joe posing with a derelict Antonov 2.

Joe’s first work project was to make a report about how MIAT’s competitors administer frequent flyer programs. MIAT has no such program, so I thought that this was a good idea. He collected data, made spreadsheets and wrote a report. Once the report was done, Joe submitted it to a mid-level boss who said that he did not have time to read it. Time well spent, I’d say.

I invited Joe to join all of my English classes for the Boeing 737 pilots, the Antonov 26 pilots and the flight attendants. I think that the pilot stuff was a little thick for him. But he was great with the flight attendants, who said that Joe’s British English was easier for them to understand than my American English. Jeez, thanks.

The MIAT check-in and ticket sales staff need English training. They’ve been bugging me to do it, but I have refused many times since my hands are full with the pilots and flight attendants. I suggested that Joe could take this on. I put him in touch with the boss of the sales staff and he starts teaching at the city ticket office next week.

Perhaps the highlight of Joe Nelson’s week was a dinner party we invited him to on Wednesday night. Joe and I ended up in the kitchen talking with a Brit named Richard. We talked a lot about MIAT, which is an endless conversation topic in UB. During a short pause in the conversation, Joe said to Richard, “So, what’s your role here?”

“I’m the British Ambassador,” explained Richard.

Everybody chuckled and Joe turned a little red.