Workplace Poison

I've yet to post my Jeju travel journal, and that will happen soon, but this is a bit more important. So here goes. The most bizarre workplace experience I've ever had.

So, some background. The head instructor is pretty much an elevated teacher. His job, in addition to teaching, is to watch the videos of our classes and give us pointers on how we could teach better, as well as to deal with management - that is, let us know what the management (who only speaks Korean) is saying, and talk to them on our behalf.

Ben, our current HI, has never been HI before, and he's stressing out about this job. He's doing the telling us what management wants just fine, but he's not standing up for us.

Now, last Monday we had a particularly fascist meeting, which started with being told that we now have to input the grades from the system into our report cards - mindless data-entry - because the Korean secretaries, who get paid for the job, don't want to do it anymore. We don't get paid for anything outside of class time. Obviously, none of us appreciated this, particularly because it shows just how little they care about us and how much they care about the Koreans.

In addition to that, Ben's speech that day - which obviously came directly from Kathy, our manager, who is also new at the job (has only been here one term before) - talked a lot about how we needed to improve as teachers, saying that if we don't improve, they'll drop us down to three classes a week - which is in direct violation of our contracts, which state that we are guaranteed a minimum of four.

One of the teachers pointed out that this was a contract-breaker, and Ben responds, well, you COULD be fired.

Now. We're a bit shocked by all this. Threats were never a part of our relationship with management before, and none of us appreciate it.

We're also told about the summer intensive program (extra classes, which a lot of teachers want because they get extra pay). Someone asks if it's mandatory, we're told yes, it is.

Obviously it's mandatory if we've got as many classes to teach as there are teachers, and that's normal, but that's not what we were told when I asked for clarification.

Their deal was, for example, I don't want a summer morning class - I value my sanity and my hapkido. Wes does want one - he needs the money. But, if they choose me to do a class and not Wes, it's tough shit for both of us.

So instead of making two teachers happy, they get two incredibly pissed off teachers.

I ask about this, and am told that we've got to do what we're told, not complain, threats, etcetera.

So.

This whole situation is obviously poisonous.

At the start of the term everyone was feeling good, but suddenly we feel terrible. We're not respected, we're being threatened and talked down to.

I decide, then, to write a letter to Ben, detailing why we're unhappy and what about the management's attitude has got to change, along with some requests for Ben - very polite ones, mind - to be on our side and stand up for us, because who else will? he's the HI, he speaks Korean, and it's his job, but he's only parroting what he's told, not defending us. Of course, I used kinder language about him in the letter. I explain that you can't motivate employees by threatening them. You can only get people to work harder if they're happy, and you make them happy by rewarding them. With threats, they'll work just enough to keep their jobs. With rewards, they'll actually try.

But I don't think they understand this basic management concept.

Now yesterday..
We have a meeting at 3:00, one hour before classes start. We go over some basic stuff about the changes that are happening to our classes, and then Kathy, our manager, gets up and starts to talk.

She's speaking Korean, so Ben is translating.

She starts off about how difficult her job is, and how she has pride in her teachers. How she has to do all sorts of work and handle the parents and such - we know, that's in her job description. And she goes on about how she's very upset if the teachers don't want to do their jobs.

She goes on and on, and then she singles me out, looks directly at me, and says, "Brandon, are you happy with your experience in Korea?"

This looks and feels like a direct threat. Ben obviously shared my letter (incompletely translated, I think) or at least some complaints and the writer's identity with her, and she is pissed off.

She continues.

She talks about how she has to field 500 complaints a week from parents (again, this is her job) and smooths them over. Little things like, "The class is too boring," or, "The class is too much fun," or, "Teacher's hair is too long." Stupid things we can't do anything about.

Then she says, "I can make your lives a lot harder."

She threatens us with giving us regular parent-teacher meetings to deal with these complaints ourselves.

Her speech lasts 20 minutes, does not give us an opportunity to speak or explain, and then she leaves. Not a meeting, just a lecture. She doesn't address the issues I brought up about threats and the poisonous culture, she just gives us more threats.

Then Ben gets up, and he begins with, "I don't know how many of you know this, but Brandon wrote me a letter the other day..." once again singling me out, probably trying to turn the others against me, and continues: "and he tells me that you guys don't feel like I'm on your side. Y'know, that makes me really angry."

And he begins to shout at us. He slams the desk like an angry father talking to us like we're his really badly-behaved children, shouting about how we don't do our work and how everything bad we do reflects badly on him and everything is our fault.

How "if you've ever had a REAL JOB, back in America," looking directly at me (even though I'm Canadian) "you know that you have to do work outside of office hours!" Referring to the grade-input data entry complaint, which was mostly a problem because of how it was presented to us.

He's going on about how we don't want to do our jobs and that's ridiculous.

He's shouting at us.

Slamming the desks.

And when I put my hand up and ask, "Okay, can I explain something about the grades thing here?" he points at me and says, "NO. I read your letter. Be quiet. I'm talking," and keeps going on.

Wes, a teacher with whom he's butted heads in the past couple weeks, says, very relaxed and calm, "Dude, you don't have to yell at us."

Ben points at him. "You. No. You can't talk. Get out."
"I don't want to get out."
"Tough shit. Get out."
Wes is again completely calm. "You wouldn't talk to me like this outside," meaning in this case that he wouldn't be shouting at him about his job outside of the workplace.
Ben: "You want to take this outside?"

He marches over to wes and leans over him, his fists on the desk.
"We can take this outside."

He actually challenged Wes to a fight, in front of everyone.

Now, his tactic of trying to turn everyone against me obviously didn't work, because everyone was pissed off and both before and after the meeting thanked me for saying something.

So the meeting ended after a lot more arguing between him and the other teachers and Ben's shouting while we remain calm and try to explain things rationally. We only broke it up at four o'clock when the classes started.

It was the most surreal professional (or rather unprofessional) experience of my life.

I don't have a clue what's going to happen to me, since the manager knows about my letter and is obviously pissed off, but everyone agrees that something had to be said, and at the very least now we're not going to have to do intensives if we don't want to unless we're loaded with students. But I've got to talk to our director. He knows nothing about what goes on at this campus - just signs papers and collects money. I'm anticipating a load of small revenges from the manager... we'll see what happens.

Sigh.

I'm glad I don't really care all that much. I just want the next five months to be relatively pleasant.

Long-past-due update

Ye gods, I didn't realize how long it's been since I updated this thing. I've sort of disappeared from the Internet for a bit, it seems. My apologies to anyone who thinks I've died or faded out of existence or something.

So since my rather depressing set of issues back in the time of my last post, things have been remarkably good. Seoul's weather has been nice and warm (though it's becoming really hot now, not that I'm complaining), I've been to a few interesting places, and Hanna is here visiting me. Hooray!

I'll try to make this as coherent as I can with my poor memory and go chronologically.

Jinhae
After the evening in Changwon, Tom and I went to Jinhae with the rest of his coworkers to see the cherry blossoms. A 20-minute drive became over 90 minutes because everyone was going there for exactly the same reason. But it wasn't so bad, anyway. Once we got to the town itself, we took in some of the sights: a uniformed police officer sitting on a bench and weeping into the arms of his partner, a man impeccably dressed in a business suit sifting through garbage the entire five minutes we were stuck in the same place (he was looking for a glove), and innumerable identically-dressed couples, most walking or carrying tiny white dogs which were either dyed pink or wearing shoes. The city itself is beautiful, of course... cherry blossoms everywhere, and it's right on the sea. We saw a turtle ship and dressed in the uniform of Korean naval officers.

Busan
Mina, the girl I met in Changwon, invited me later that week to go to Busan with her for a weekend. Busan is one of Korea's larger cities, and has the country's most famous and largest beach, Hyundae Beach. We walked down it Saturday evening as people all along were shooting off fireworks or sitting in the sand holding hands. We were headed toward the 7-11 to grab some beer for a relaxing seaside drink, when we passed a man lighting a large number of candles in the sand. Interesting, we thought, but we kept going. Then we passed him on our way back.

The man was standing in a heart-shaped enclosure of lit candles, with his bewildered and laughing girlfriend in his arms. A crowd of people were gathered around to watch them. He spoke, and Mina translated for me - "Will you marry me?" The crowd applauded.
Then, before the deliriously happy woman could answer, a voice came over the loudspeaker: "This is beach security. There are no fires allowed on the beach. Please put out the candles and disperse."
Right in the middle of a marriage proposal.

That made my night, because the security people were saying nothing at all to the drunkards lighting off fireworks a few metres away. I believe that the security guard could only have been feeling lonely, and got particularly bitter when he saw this wonderfully romantic scene unfolding in front of him.

Besides that, we saw an aquarium full of bizarre fish and lovely penguins, and two famous temples on the seaside (beautiful... I have pictures, but I'm far too lazy to post 'em now), and ate black noodles at one of Korea's most famous restaurants. Highlights of eating include one place we saw claiming to serve "live food" and tanks all along the streets with the strangest and most phallic-looking squirmy creatures you could ever hope to see.

Seoul Writers
I discovered a writers' group online which meets every two weeks to share and discuss the writings of its members, give criticism, and do writing exercises to get us all in creative mode. I've joined up and so far been to three of them (scheduling issues). I enjoy it, and it's actually helped a bit in getting me writing more.

DJ Festival
One weekend I arranged to meet a pair of girls who were new to Seoul. We wandered around Dongdaemun (and completely failed to find the flea market again - turns out it moved), Namdaemun, and Gyeongbukgung (a palace, where we saw huge numbers of people in traditional dress marching around and posing for pictures). Later they joined my coworkers and I at the World DJ festival, wherein I saw more foreign faces than I thought existed in Korea and had my ass grabbed more times than I could possibly count. It was fun, though mostly I stayed in the beer tent being amused by the antics of drunken English-speakers and taking pictures of men who kept telling us we weren't allowed to take pictures. Some strange acts included a German man wearing a suit made entirely of coloured flashing LEDs wandering around the stage while music played.

Daegum-gul
Caves! Mina and I went to see caves in Daegum. We took a tour, 'cause it was cheaper than going ourselves. Like everything outside of Seoul, it seems, the area is fantastically beautiful. The caves are in mountains surrounded by trees and rivers and strange people selling wooden statues of penises. Sadly, they've become a bit of a major tourist attraction, so there were steel walkways and guardrails stopping you from doing any real exploring as well as huge crowds of people. The second cave (there were two) wasn't so crowded, but you weren't allowed to take pictures. Still, it was fantastic. There's an underground lake inside, nine metres deep and filled with the clearest water you could hope to see, slick white flowstone, and bizarre stalactites ranging from the standard phallus-shape to paper-thin sheets of rock. Waterfalls too. An amazing place, and I wish we were free to explore on our own. Not in Korea, I'm told.

Hanna
Hanna's here! We did all kinds of exploring together and discovered that there's actually a park near my apartment, which makes Gangseo-gu a thousand times more livable. She spent a lot of time sleeping during her first week here, but we went places and saw things and generally have been having a lot of fun. In-town we saw Iron Man, went to Insadong, and drew pictures with pastels we found at the 1000-won store. Last weekend we went to Gyeongju, a city full of history as it was Korea's capital until a couple hundred years ago, and saw burial mounds, entered a tomb, went to temples and museums and ate strange food at a really friendly restaurant and slept in a bed that was actually big enough for two people. Amazing! Before that we also went to the traditional hwaeshik, where my boss takes the new and departing teachers out for a night of eating and drinking and ridiculous drinking games. Hanna was quite embarrassed after one of the Korean secretaries told me, "Your girlfriend is so beautiful."

In her first week here, we went to the relocated flea market and Hanna bought a traditional cymbal (she was so happy about that) as well as an autographed record of "Korean art songs". In the aisle that nobody goes to without glancing about to make sure no one's looking, we found odd sex toys, mainly consisting of products which fit over your regular genitalia to make them... um... larger. There was also a man carving a penis out of wood, who embarrassedly allowed me to take a couple of pictures of him.

Next week we're going to Jeju Island, to see a volcano and caves and old women with spears diving for fish and waterfalls and all sorts of lovely wonderful things and I'm very excited but mostly excited simply to have Hanna here for a month.

The next six months feel like they're going to be so much more livable now. I'm doing things and I'm feeling good.

I also have my blue belt in hapkido. I think I've destroyed at least one of my shoulders, but hopefully that will heal somewhat during my week off.

Cherry blossoms and cool people

Man, I didn't realize just how badly I needed a day out of Seoul. My friend Tom, who is escaping soon to Taiwan, invited me down to Changwon - South Korea's alternative capital in case Seoul gets bombed to bits by Kim Jong-Il - where he lives and works for some fun and a cherry blossom festival. The weather reports forecasted rain for this weekend (no surprise there), but I wanted to get out and see my buddy before he left, as well as see a bit of Korea, so on Saturday (would've gone Friday night but he works Saturdays) I took the "express" bus (five hours) to Changwon from the express terminal, which is an hour's subway ride away from where I live. It was a long trip, but no matter.

After a minor debacle with a cab driver taking as long as he could get away with to bring me to Tom's apartment, I saw my friend outside the Family Mart, drinking, like ya do, with two other foreigners - an Irish lass, and, I believe, a South African. This sort of thing is standard foreigner procedure in Korea, you see.

From there, we proceeded to a party with his coworkers and friends on the roof of their apartment building - but first, of course, we needed booze. Which brought us to our first adventure:


Creepy Construction Worker Guy

We wandered on down to a small grocery store in a basement. On our way down we passed a tall, strange ajosshi in coveralls and a yellow construction worker's helmet, who started rambling in Korean upon seeing Tom. We believe he thought Tom was Russian.

Anyway, we proceeded on to the beer aisle, while we looked at our (very sadly limited) options. But the creepy fellow had followed us and began gesturing at the dried fish foodstuffs on the racks while making what I believe had to be suggestive comments. We did our best to talk with him, but we didn't know a scrap of his language, and nor did he ours.

When we picked up our beer (maekju), he perked up, as if genuinely impressed that we were buying (so much?) beer. He started rambling on about alcohol, and the various benefits that could be derived from it, in the most physical manner possible: he snatched at Tom's crotch, and pulled his hand back up to his face with a vigorous sniffing. He then did the same to me, making, much to my dismay, contact with the bits he was apparently talking about. As far as I could tell, he was trying to tell us that a) beer makes you manly, or b) it makes your urine stink.

After the crotch-grabbing incident, we hurried away from the crazy fellow, who was happily distracted by one of the store employees as he elaborated on the benefits of maekju.


We went on to the roof, where I met some of his quite fun and lovely coworkers and friends, chatted a while, till it got cold and we retired to someone's apartment for more drinking and chatting and suchlike with more people showing up.

At that point we (or somebody, anyway) decided it was time to go to a nightclub, which was apparently all you can drink for 15,000 won, a pretty nice deal when they throw in platters of fruit for free. I tore up the dancefloor all night with Mina, one of the Korean girls who work at their school... good times.

It was about 4:30 AM when, in a slow, random trickle, we somewhat disorientatedly left the club - and we unfortunately missed the creepy short fellow stalking one of the girls. Probably (hopefully) harmless, but would've been fun to see.

I need more nights like that. Tales (and maybe pictures, if you're not on Facebook) of the next day to follow.

Clueless

So now I've got to suddenly rearrange everything I thought I knew and figure out some kind of new plan. It's a daunting task.

At least it's sunny out again...

On a more positive note, tomorrow I'm taking a five-hour bus to Changwon to see a friend and the cherry blossom festival. Finally absorbing a little Korean culture, perhaps. Cherry blossoms are supposed to be beautiful... and Changwon should be a bit more natural than Seoul... so let's hope for a positive iteration of Spring here.

I'll bring my camera.

Ye gods.

I had something to post about Easter last weekend, but it just kind of fell off... I'll put it up later. Today I'm just shocked and appalled and dismayed at the unreasonableness of nature in this country.

At first it seemed like unfortunate coincidence, but it's happened far too often - there must be some kind of malevolent force or at least a decent scientific explanation of the phenomenon. It is as follows:

No matter how beautiful and sunny and lovely the weekdays in Seoul are, the weekends will be utter crap.

This has been my experience over the past four months here... I believe I've seen two nice weekends, and those were both a while ago now. At this point I can say with complete confidence that something causes weekends to become grey and cold and wet and dark and altogether unpleasant, even though on Friday and the following Monday the sun will shine and the sky will radiate blueness.

So what causes this? Is it the fact that traffic picks up on weekends as everyone frantically drives out of Seoul to escape the certainty of terrible weekend weather, pollutants from all the cars spewing into the air and becoming both the cause and the effect of this bizarre and depressing phenomenon?

What a country. I need a vacation.

Dongdaemun Stadium

Ack, I'm kind of bad about updating, aren't I?

Korea's been okay to me over the past couple of weeks. Winter has been very reluctantly releasing its stranglehold on Seoul... we see days around a nice, balmy eight degrees, and the very next day the ground will be covered with snow and ice... but I think it's finally let up, which can only mean one thing: Yellow Dust, that fifth season wherein poisonous dust storms streak across the sky and even the foreigners wear masks on the streets. There have, according to Army monitoring sites, been days at areas across Seoul where the danger level has been off the charts, but here in Gangseo we've not seen a speck, so far as I can tell. Hopefully that remains the case and I get an unexpected perk of living in such a less-than-interesting region.

I've not been going out much, though our celebration in greeting of the new teacher was fun. We went to Wild Vill after far too much heavy Chinese food and sweet but strong Chinese liquor and horrible-as-usual Korean beer, where there were darts and bartenders who put on shows involving the spinning of flaming liquor bottles. Good times. I helped Nick win 10,000 won in a rather abysmal darts game. A lot of my time has been spent reading or cursing the unpredictable weather - last weekend I had planned to go mountain-hiking, only to be foiled by one of those unexpected bad days. But I've gotten a fair bit of progress done on my graphic novel project, so I can't complain too much.

Hapkido has been great as ever, though two Fridays ago Nick and I walked into the class as normal a bit before 11:30, expecting a usual day, and the place was overrun with children. Only the older sonseignim was there, and his English is nonexistent, so I had to sit politely and confusedly in the office until the younger instructor came in. After a few requests for an explanation, it turned out that every month they have a testing class at this time... so we had a surprise grading. Having only been there a couple weeks, I don't think we did too spectacularly... but we've moved up on the belt chart with the terrible photographs on it, so we must have done okay. The class is back to normal now, and it's excellent. It's a great reason to get up in the mornings.

Regardless, that's not the main point of today's post.

Today's post is about Dongdaemun Stadium, formerly an important athletic building and now the site of Seoul's big flea market. The place is full of vendors selling anything from massively-cut-price clothing to weapons to sex toys and bootleg porn DVDs. They've even got cassette tapes. It was an experience walking around in there... it was like being in some of the seedier parts of Paris's antiques market. A lot of fun, and I kind of wish I'd been there with a) more money and b) competence in the language.

My favourite parts, of course, were the people selling absolutely anything they had - one vendor had constructed a wall of miscellaneous junk supported at the bottom by a tangle of assorted electronics cables and occasionally reinforced with old luggage. Upon this pile were busted-up camcorders, tools, and the occasional musical instrument. It was the flea market equivalent of a catacombs. It's a potential gold mine of weird crap - sadly, the limited space in between aisles and the constant press of people makes proper digging impossible.

But within this dizzying array of random and useless things, I found a wondrous treasure.

Yes, I have realized one of my life's ambitions. Well, closer to partially-realized, to be honest, because it could be bigger, but it's a great placeholder for now.

For many, many years I have wished for a stuffed (read: taxidermy) crocodile to hang from my ceiling, a dream influenced mainly by the wizards of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, whose bedrooms simply must, for some unexplained reason, be decorated with one of these reptiles.

Well, it's smaller than I hope for, and it's not technically a crocodile, but I present to you my new pet:


He doesn't do much, but he's fun to have around.

And that's it for now. I close wondering whether I'm going to have to tell off my inconsiderate next-door neighbour again, who has an unfortunate habit of playing the television at ridiculous volumes. The walls are concrete here, but that's not enough to stop his annoying pastime from reaching my ears. Alas...

I hope all's well back home in Canada and the States and Ireland and wherever else people may be reading from. Goodbye from Korea.

Cliche #604: Emotional Roller-Coaster

It's trite, but there's a reason cliches are cliche. What better image is there to describe extreme emotional highs and lows in a short period?

Two Fridays ago, I was happy and excited about my life here in Korea. Hapkido was going well, I had received an e-mail saying my book (Manga Studio for Dummies) would arrive within two days, and a new term was coming with a new schedule showing fewer hours and new classes, all of them late elementary to early middle school, the group of kids I seem, based on the past term, to get on with best. A friend told me she'd be arriving in Korea to teach not too far away by subway. I was thinking about my comic. Things looked good.

Then on Monday, we had a meeting, in which we were given yet another revision of the schedule, with my awesome classes going to a new teacher and me getting two classes of the second-lowest level and age they have at this school, as well as one each of the next two levels. Young children. Yikes. I've never really understood young children, and the youngest groups in my previous term were the ones I'd had the most trouble with. Surely my head instructor had noticed this when going over our CCTVs? Surely there was some mistake? But after some questioning and nagging and a promise he'd look into changes, I was told that it was too late and there was no way to revise the schedule.

Happiness and anticipation move out of the way. Dread settles in comfortably.

I had gotten into an absolute funk. No energy, except in hapkido class. My favourite classes felt like they were dragging. Even the new material I was teaching, which was actually exciting compared to the stuff we'd had, felt like suck. I was half-convinced I would hate it and not be able to get through the coming three months. It's amazing what one little twist can do. Ah, and also, Manga Studio for Dummies, though the e-mail had said it shipped, was not in my hands. All week.

A little over three hours ago I was still filled with dread. My first class was to be my youngest group. Couple that with the usual dread of having to make the first impression on a new pile of people, and things weren't feeling nice. But I tried to make the best of it, tried to convince myself that I'd have a good crop of students, and went in with as much energy as I could muster and as much smiliness and excitement as I could inject.

Damn, was I surprised.

Not only did the material not completely suck (a major problem I'd had with the level above this one last term), but the kids were (mostly) respectful and paid attention. They listened, they interacted, they laughed at my silly drawings, and it was actually, dare I say it... fun.

So to those who had to deal with my dread, my apologies.

I'm excited once again. Tomorrow I have another class of the same level of kids... hopefully, if I do things the same as today, the rest of the term will be good. The key, I've learned, is to start out strict, establish your rules, call them on it when they break 'em, and force the timid ones to interact... and at the same time, relate yourself to the kids. I opened the class with an attendance check in which I called the kids' names - then asked each one to talk about him or herself for a bit. I occasionally interjected some - like when a girl said she liked to draw dragons, I mentioned my own monster-drawing.

It was good.

Let's hope things go well tomorrow.

Ah, yes. My book had apparently delivered, but the ajosshi who "guards" the building had mistaken my room number on the package (1413). I looked into his office and saw a book-shaped box with 413 on it, and took some initiative and walked in. He was confused, but I pointed to my name on the box, pointed to myself a few times, and he seemed to get it. At least, I thought so, but then I got a buzz on my intercom saying, "Box - four-one-three, you one-four-one-three! Wrong box! Four-one-three! Four-one-three!" Happily, it was remedied easily enough once I had him put on his glasses.

Time to plan out some comic-drawing practice!