Learning to Think Like a Korean - A Game You Will Never Win

A couple of weeks ago I had a quintessential Korean experience. It started when one of my co-workers, we’ll just call him Mr. Kim, offered to dump his old furniture off on me, as he was getting married and would be refurbishing the new house with less bachelor pad-like orange pleather couches. The grad student in me (I assume she’ll be around until the loans are paid off) jumped at the chance, and we agreed that he would call me the following day after the couches were on the moving truck and ready to be dropped at my apartment – probably around one o’clock or so. The only catch was that I would pay the extra moving fees for having the furniture delivered. Great deal, I thought.

The next day I decide to head home from work – about a 40 minute commute – after lunch, in order to be home for the furniture delivery. One o’clock comes and goes with no word. At two, I call Mr. Kim wondering if everything is still going as planned. Our conversation goes something like this:

“Um, hi, Mr Kim? Yeah, so I just wanted to let you know that I’m waiting here at home so call me when the movers are on the way over, ok?”
“You’re already at home? I thought that you could ride with the movers from work so they could find your apartment.”
“Um, well, I’m already at home. And you didn’t tell me that yesterday.”
“So, then, can you come back here and then ride in the truck back to your place with them so they can find it?”
“Um, no, that doesn’t really make any sense. Why don’t I just tell you my address and you can tell them where to go?”
“But I don’t know where you live”
“Yes, I know that. But if I give you my address, you can look it up on the internet or something. I mean, this is a moving company – how do they usually find people’s homes? Don’t they have a navigation system?”
“Not today”
“Not today? Really? They usually have one, but just not today?”
“Yeah”
SIGH…… “Ok look, I’m going to give you my address. You give it to the movers. Give them my phone number. Tell them to call me if they get lost.”
“But you don’t speak Korean”
“Um, yes, I’m aware of that.”

Thirty minutes later, the movers – or should I say mover – arrives. I go out to meet him. I see the couches – a loveseat and a couch that could seat about five – and realize, oh great, there is no way these are getting through the front door. I ask him in my crappy Korean, “one person? Just you?”. He says yes. Fabulous. I am in my suit and heels, there’s only one mover, and this couch is going to have to go through the window – the one with the prison bars across the front. He seems to have forgotten his power screwdriver, so I sit around while he manually unscrews all the bolts in the prison bars, then yanks out all the screens and windows from the frame and piles them up on the side of the street. Finally I get to help. Somehow I get stuck being the person who has to carry one end of the couch to the open window, prop it up on the frame, run inside and slip my shoes off (no shoes inside!), then guide the couch in through the window and make sure the other end doesn’t fall on my toes as the mover shoves it through from outside the apartment. We manage to successfully get the thing through the window, go through the whole process again with the loveseat, and then I get to relax on my “new” furniture. I sit down, kinda tired and sweaty, and stick to the pleather. Comfy.
Then comes the best part.

“That’ll be sixty bucks”
“What?! Sixty?! That’s absurd. I just moved the damn thing myself – why would I pay you that much?!” (This last part I say in English and he just stares at me).

I don’t really believe that this is a decent price, so I decide to call up Mr Kim and ask his opinion. I update him on the situation and ask him if he thinks sixty is too much to be charged for moving your own furniture. He says,

“Well, but that’s a really nice couch”
“Wait, what? I’m not paying him for the couch, I’m paying him to move the couch. Except that I had to move the couch, so it should be less, see?”
“In Korea, the quality of the furniture matters in the moving fee.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Well that’s how it works in Korea.”
SIGH….. “Ok….thanks again for the couch….”

I go outside and continue to plead my case, though he doesn’t understand what I’m saying, with the mover. We stand there arguing in our own languages, getting nowhere, until a nice Korean woman walks by and offers to help. We get the guy down to fifty, and I grudgingly accept, ready to be done with this transaction. I’ve really been doing my best to try and learn to "think" like a Korean (which I really think is a good skill to acquire when living in country as the confusion of everyday life is otherwise astounding), but so far, much of the time, I’m not really sure that’s even what they’re doing.