You vill purchase eine Banana!

Have you ever awoken on a Saturday morning to find yourself in a Nazi death camp? Nein? If you would like to have a piece of that experience and still get to keep the majority of your gold teeth, I recommend spending a weekend in a Seoul residential neighborhood. Every Saturday I awake to some old bastard screaming in a megaphone like an SS Officer:

"Hey Assholes! Buy some fucking bananas right Now! You will wake up and come buy these bananas! Holy crap these bananas are amazing and cheap. Buy them or I will bury you in an unmarked grave"

At least that's what it sounds like he's saying. My Korean isn't good enough to decipher megaphone commands, but the death camp tone is definitely established. I know he's selling bananas, or some other crap you can already easily acquire at any corner store, because the bastard parks his truck right in front of my house. Sometimes he walks up and down the street with a megaphone. Other times he sits in the truck and uses a recording, blasting from the speakers on top of the truck.

The best part is when other trucks come buy selling more shit I don't need - then we get dueling megaphones! Usually it's fruit or fish, but sometimes these assholes have the gall to scream about chestnuts or cheap shoes. I even saw a guy with a hat and visor truck. Who the hell is lying in bed on a Saturday morning thinking to themselves "damn, I could really use a new cheap plastic sun-visor...oh great! the visor truck is here!" ???

What's more, I'm pretty sure I've never even seen anyone buy anything off these obnoxious old bastards. I for one wouldn't buy his bananas and sun visor if I were starving to death on a sunny day - that would only convince him that his Nazi tactics had succeeded.

So the other day I went outside, determined to punish the two trucks together by hurling rocks and epithets. I discovered there was only 1 truck. The banana-selling Himler had the truck speakers cranked, and was walking around in a circle adding his megaphone to the fray. There's no way anyone could hope to understand what the two of him were screaming about, so I can only assume he's been hired by the Korean government to torture me.

Security Duty

Ever wonder what it's like to be a security guard? How about an on-call secretary? Wouldn't it kick ass to somehow be a combination of both?

Well if you work for a korean company, that dream will be fulifilled, whether you like it or not. I just learned that one of my co-workers will be here at the office during our national holiday on friday. Wasting a holiday at the office - she must have some really important project to work on right? Actually no, and not just because none of the projects here are important. She's on an assignment referred to as "Tanjik", which I'm told is a rotating position that at least 2 regular employees are required to fill on every major holiday and most saturdays.

The way she described it, my colleague will come in on her holiday and spend 7 hours walking around on each floor of the buidling, checking to see who's here. This is supposedly meant to do more than simply keep a record of who's working overtime (because nobody is paid for overtime, so who really cares).
If there is some kind of emergency, she is somehow expected to deal with it. These emergencies could range from a fire in the building to the death of an overseas employee. She of course has no experience dealing with either of those issues, nor do any of the other countless suckers made to waste their vacation days on Tanjik. The fact that this whole idea is not only a waste of her time but also completely unsuited to her skills is completley ignored. "Where the hell are the security gaurds on these days?", I inquired.

"Well, they really wouldn't know how to handle all the possible situations that might arise", said my boss. Oh really? And who would exactly? My 24 year old colleague who has never seen a building burn nor responded to dead employee phonecalls? Who understand these improbable crises and why would they be any more qualified to do so than our security personnel or our secrataries?

The Koreans have no response to this.

Tanjik is a typical Korean corporate strategy - invent some mythic problem that can only be addressed by an institution which serves no purpose and defies logical explanation. Give this institution a special name, like "Tanjik", and convince your hapless employees that it's somehow an honor to waste your time in this fashion. Equivocate whenever questions are asked and ascribe some sort of intangible values to the ridiculous excercise. Pretend that the whole thing has some honorable and wise tradition behind it when in fact you're just hell bent on ruining somebody's day off.

And why do that? Why spend more effort inventing meaningless tasks than you spend on actual productive work? Because this is Korea. Meaningless bullshit is what we're all about.