The Chinese dude who is going to make me filthy rich

That nuclear war head that every teacher has also known as the ‘stop it right now’ look

Many times when your bank balance is not as interesting as you would like it to be, reading about those with obscene (it is obscene from my point of view) wealth becomes a pastime. I am talking about the billionaires in US dollars. The ones who could easily wire me $3m and the press would not bother them or even notice.

One such person a guy called Jack Ma. His name may be short but his wealth is not. Jack (I will call him Jack to feed my imagination of what it would be like knowing him on a first name basis) is a Chinese entrepreneur, the founder and Executive Chairman of Alibaba group.

He is the richest man in China. Hold on, let me rephrase. This guy has more money than over 1 billion people who share citizenship with him. According to Forbes, he is worth $19.5Billion.

The fact that I am not even the richest in my village is proof that my situation should be declared a humanitarian disaster already. Of course I am not the poster child of poverty but the onky thing I can prove now is that I am not a child. Poverty and I are not such enemies; we do hang out more than we should.

Reading about wealthy people is not just fun for me, it is also part of a continuous research to try and find anything we have in common of which money is clearly not. I struggle to look for the slightest commonality and thus hope that maybe one day, preferably tomorrow; I too will be a billionaire.

Well for Jack I didn’t have to look so hard. It turns out that somewhere on both our CVs (I know he no longer needs one) it says ‘Teacher’. Yes both of us are teachers and to be precise, English language teachers. That is not all as we both left the class to do other things with our lives. He became a businessman and a billionaire while at it and since I have the time to blog about this you can tell I am neither a billionaire nor a serious entrepreneur.

Anyway, the English teacher bit is enough and I am satisfied that sooner rather than later I am going to be a billionaire too. Yes very soon, I will be hiding from photographers and dealing with endless requests from universities to come and inspire their students.

On a serious note, I do think there’s something about English language teachers that propels them to vast wealth. Maybe it is our knack to correct people’s grammar. What if correcting grammar is not so different from seeing loopholes in stock prices.

What if our ‘don’t dare mess with me’ look that scares students who risk to interrupt the class as we teach, is the key to managing human resources on the way to your billionaire dollar status. I am totally convinced that there is $omething about teaching the Queen’s language and Jack has discovered it. It is clear that he has not yet shared the secret with most teachers that why we are still poor.

I am just waiting for him to send me the secret formula and if he is too busy he can just send me the $3m. I won’t complain. He can keep the rest of the $19.something million (I am an English not Maths teacher). Hey, Jack I am refreshing my browser looking for a sign from you. Thanks in advance.