Living in New Zealand I met one very strange guy. A former sailor from Ukraine desperately wanting to become a kiwi. However, he didn’t want to do anything to obtain permanent residence. He thought it would come to him without any efforts. He needed to learn English, but he was too lazy to do it. He motivated his unwillingness to learn the language by the difficulty of pronunciation. Ha-ha-ha!

   The story becomes even funnier, because he thought the authorities would let him stay after understanding his problem!!! LOL! He didn’t even want to realize that he had chosen to live in the country where the native language was English and he had to speak it no matter what.

   The authorities gave him three months to study language to pass IELTS (English knowledge test). This guy called me and asked if I could give him English lessons. Three months is enough time to learn basics of any language, so I said I could do it and asked him when he wanted to start. He said this was not urgent (!) and he would call me in a week to agree on time. It turned out that just one day before our conversation he had received a letter saying that he would be evicted from the country if he didn’t pass the test. However, he didn’t inform me on this.

   Three months passed and I almost forgot about this guy, but one afternoon he called me again and said, ‘Could you come to my place tonight to help me with English? I’m going to have the test tomorrow morning?’

    LOL!!!! I was like… WHAT?!!!

    But I asked politely, ‘Have you had any English lessons till today?’

    He said, ‘No. But we’ll have all night long to study.’

   I roared with laughter, ‘It’s ridiculous! I’m not going to waste my or your time. Do you realize that you don’t know a word in English and to learn the structure of the language takes longer than one night? It’s too late. Why didn’t you call me a couple of months ago?’