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.