Strange Business Practices and Inappropriate Work Conversations

One thing Wexford forgot to mention in his previous posts on his corporate training seminar was a comment by one of the speakers, a foreign employee at the company who was quite frank with the new employees. “You might think, after working here in Korea for a while, ‘I’ve worked for large international companies before, and this company is doing everything wrong!’”. There will be lots of business practices, he warned, that will seem odd to you, if not downright ridiculous. I think I know just what he means.

At a meeting with some co-workers a couple weeks ago, I was informed that our company used to rely on palm reading to hire new employees. Apparently, they would read your palm before they agreed to hire you, and often they resorted to some “face reading” as well. I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, and assumed that this was something that took place, say, before I or anyone I know was born. But nope, this was regular practice until a few years ago. Another one of my co-workers at the meeting nodded in agreement, pointing to his face to indicate that they had “read” his face before he was hired. The thinking, apparently, was that you could tell what kind of worker someone was by looking at their face. But what if you were just really tired at your job interview and had dark circles under your eyes that made you look crappy?, I wondered aloud. Would they hold that against you? No, they told me, but women with bags under their eyes are considered to be very “sexually charged”. Ok….

With the conversation shifting quickly to extreme impropriety, I found myself at a sudden loss for words. I remember thinking, however, that if I had been in a job interview at that moment, there’s no way I would’ve been hired. The look on my face said it all.