Yesterday I wrote that TBI Kelapa Gading was having a ‘Custom Party’- they really meant a costume party, of course- which showed that Anita Pasaribu was, as we warned, a completely unsuitable person to be the school manager of an English school. It also shows the incompetence of TBI’s wretched Head Office. I mean shouldn’t they have told her to use her expat staff to do a spell-check and editing service before putting out a spelling-error-riddled promotion? Any parent with semi-decent English is going to notice the numerous mistakes and realise how low TBI’s academic standards are.

But at least Ms Pasaribu is trying. She has run a competition. It might have only had a dozen parents there, but she made the effort. This puts her a few notches above almost all the other managers. Hers was a botched effort, but at least she tried. Looking at the websites for other TBI schools, you get the impression that lifting a pen would be an unbearable effort for most of these people. Let’s go to TBI Riau, for example. This used to be their biggest school based on student numbers (though TBI Kuningan was more profitable). At the start of 2013, Scott Martin- Luke Preece’s home-town best buddy since kindergarten- was re-appointed school manager there after Mariam was stood down as TBI Director. We warned people that Martin was a lazy sod who was famous for doing no work. We had received emails from expat staff saying he sat in his office looking at a computer screen and doing no practical management work. We were told that he was an incompetent manager who couldn’t even keep books in stock or inform people when pays were late. So what happened after Luke re-installed this stooge over Ratna, who had close to 20 years’ experience?

The last update of TBI Riau event or announcement on their bulletin board was in April 2013. Yep, that’s 10 months ago. After a few months or trying a bit harder (Martin had been demoted in April 2012 after the first round of complaints about his useless management), he  clearly went back to “do nothing” mode. For 10 long months he has not bothered to update the TBI Riau website once. Worse still, he has left the old notices stuck up there (see below) as an advertisement to everyone in Bandung that TBI Riau is a lazy, ineffectively run business. 10 month old events on your website bulletin board? Pathetic. With Wall Street coming to Bandung, these slackers are going to be steamrollered. And yet they will sit around congratulating each other on how “premium” TBI is. As always.

Martin’s 10 month old notices. Shame.