The Cult of Inconvenience

 This was going to be my "first trip of the year" post but Fate and my habit of self-sabotage to create blog fodder dictated otherwise. 

There are a lot of prerequisites to the full understanding of this post. You have to know about my long history of being screwed by Korean (and for that matter ALL) telecommunications companies. Because of that and the inconvenience of living in Sokcho, I had a useless phone plan. You have to know about the insane problem we all have settling into Korea nowadays because banks have a rule that you need a cell phone to get an account and most cellphone companies have the rule that you need a bank account to get a cellphone plan. At least a decent one. I needed to get paid so that's WHY I settled for a useless cellphone plan. Yes, although Korea is advancing in banking and cellphone technology, it is regressing in banking and cellphone convenience, at least for foreigners. It's all part of what I am going to entitle this post, the cult of inconvenience and, like so many things, it's not like Korea is alone in this, they just do it more openly and to greater extremes than other places. And the cult of inconvenience, one of the Satanic butt-babies of capitalism run amok, is nowhere more evident than in the travel industry. 

My case against my former employer is still ongoing as far as I can tell. (actually I think it's done so that's why I'm posting this today). I have been awarded my dismissal notice allowance that they illegally withheld for over six weeks and I have been told that the matter of my improper dismissal with zero just cause on the shabby grounds of "this teacher refuses to break the laws we order him to break" has been referred to the appropriate agency, board, or commission. (But I think they lied when they told me that) I have no idea what that means in terms of punishment for the school or damages awarded to me but I guess I'll just wait and see. (It means no punishment for the school and no awards for the hardship this caused me. Basically the government forced the university to pay me what they legally owed me and nothing more after booting me out of my home and forcing me to live for weeks in hotels eating out every meal. I get the punishment, they get the convenience) I also have no idea what that is doing to my immigration status and THAT makes me really nervous. The problem is I have no way of getting ahold of the Sokcho Immigration Office except for waiting for Mr. An to call me. He's the guy who has been extending my stay while this battle has raged on. But since my phone plan includes about 5 minutes of outgoing calls per month, I can't call him. I also can't call the 1345 general immigration information hotline (which, in the spirit of this post, really ought to be toll-free if convenience were a thing anybody gave half a hunk of shit about any more), and, again because INconvenience is IN, the HiKorea webpage and other pages like it where we once had the ability (with difficulty and frustration) to check our immigration status has been purposely upgraded in its difficulty and frustration for the users. Every time I put my information into those websites I get a message back that says, "No information available." From past experience I think this has to do with the creative spellings that are sometimes used for VERY important governmental agency websites. I have sometimes played Boggle and shuffled the letters of my name around and come up with the spelling the agency used, but often it's too hard to do so I've given up. It really sucks when you don't even know if the spelling is the problem and you try and try and try and... the cult of inconvenience 101.

So what I had to do was try to locate some payphones. For a place so phone-obsessed, and where there used to be payphones on hiking trails, they have successfully rid this country of them in a short period of time. They are HARD to find now! But I managed to find a few and even then when I tried to call Sokcho Immigration or the 1345 COLDline I would wait while they played music or told me how important my call was but all agents are currently busy with other callers, and then suddenly, "All agents are still busy, please call back later." This was followed by either a dial tone or a busy signal. I had managed to reach someone using a friend's phone to call 1345 and the person told me I had one month after the date of dismissal to change my immigration status. Since that time Mr. An had been calling me and asking if I was going to get a D-10 looking for work visa or leave the country or what. All I could tell him was I was waiting for the work grievance to be settled so he kept extending. Well now that it was partially settled I wondered if I needed to do something about my status. Both Mr. An and the guy at 1345 had told me that the employer HAD cancelled my E-2 visa shortly after dismissing me. Again, this should not be allowed since this presupposes the university had legitimate reason for dismissal, which, AGAIN again, they didn't. Now that the visa's cancelled, if it is decided that they fired me for any bad reason, I can't go back to work. I don't want to and imagine nobody ever does, but this makes buying out the employee's contract the only solution. I believe the government organizations see this as an extremely extreme thing to do (especially for a foreigner) and since the foreigner probably won't be able to make his/her case in English while the employer will, it's a tall task to get an unfair dismissal ruling to say the least. Oh I could do it with a lawyer to argue my case in Korean. In fact I have had several tell me I have a slam-dunk, open and shut, can't lose case here and they guaran-damn teed that I could get my contract completely bought out by the employer. But two of them told me that amount of money wouldn't cover their fee, one offered me his services for 8 million and another gave me an offer of 3 million retainer, some out-of-town expenses, and one month's pay contingent upon a ruling in our favour. My contract buy-out would probably have been about 15 million. But there are no guaran-damn tees in life and if there are, you don't get them from lawyers especially if you are a foreigner making a case in one of the most foreigner-hostile countries on the planet. Believe me, this hostility, or if you want to be more euphemistically PC, this "xenophobia" has represented the largest inconvenience of all for me in Korea and if I just added up all the money it has cost me, I could retire comfortably. 

But, as for my visa situation, I thought that maybe the best thing I could do was make a visa run to Japan. I'd leave the country, turn in my alien card, cancel my E-2 visa for sure, and return on a visitor visa. Sometimes you also need to have a plane ticket OUT of Korea when doing that but I planned on negotiating that once I got to Japan. At any rate, since I couldn't reach anyone I went to a travel agent I had used before named Khawaja at Nishaw Travel. This was Thursday and I wanted a ticket to Japan and back on Friday. He found me one for 7 AM to Osaka. Normally I am the guy who shows up WAAAAAY early for flights just to make sure I don't miss them. For this reason I hadn't even heard of a rule that check-in closes an hour before flight time. Well, that's the rule for Jeju Air, which was the airline for my flight. I guess this is something everybody knows so Khawaja just didn't tell me. Anyway, just to be sure I checked the good old internet. Google AI informed me that I definitely would be able to catch my 7 AM flight by taking the subway from Juan to Geomam then to the airport. Catch the subway at 5 and you'll get to the airport a little before 6 which will give you plenty of time to check in. 

Here's where my self-sabotage kicked in. Why did I trust the internet? Why did I trust Google? Why didn't I think of transfer time which is NOTORIOUSLY lengthy in Korea? Why didn't I ask the travel agent whose job it is to know these things? It all seems like no-brainer stuff NOW. I think I was just panicked about overstaying my visa and incurring a million-won fine. That's a thousand bucks. I didn't want to wait till I was able to get in touch with anyone, I just decided I had to go. But on Friday morning at 4 AM when I was getting ready I wasn't worried so much about my visa situation, I was worried about making my flight and thinking to myself every 30 seconds, "Why do I do these things to myself?" I got to Juan Station at 4:30 and already there were people waiting for the subway. This was encouraging. But we waited and waited while more and more people arrived. Finally at 5ish the train arrived. Well I had looked on the good old internet and discovered that from Juan to Geomam was 23 minutes and Geomam to Incheon Terminal 1 was 27 minutes. So if I spent ZERO minutes transferring between Juan and Geomam, and from Geomam to my flight's check-in counter, I could get there before 6 AM. 

I KNOW, EH? What a dope! Anyway, we got on the train at 5ish and it just sat there till 5:30. It went pretty much the way Google said. It WAS 23 minutes to Geomam then I literally RAN with all the other passengers through the LONG transfer and just barely made the train to the airport, which WAS 27 minutes. I guessed right at the 4-way intersection that I always guess wrong at and I made it to the check-in counter by 6:20. Not bad, not bad at all! The cute, young girl wearing the fake Jeju Air orangish uniform looked at my ticket and said, "Check-in for this flight is over." I said, "Yeah I thought it might be. Okay, what can we do?" She just looked blankly at me. Several other people asked for her help so it looked like she was just helping them before she answered my question, but she never answered my question. She had no idea what could be done. I gave her suggestions like, "Can I get a partial refund? Can I get on a later flight? Can I get my money back for the return ticket?" She just continued to look like she could help, but couldn't and didn't. The best she could do is look at my itinerary and tell me I have to contact the travel agent. Right. At 6:30 in the morning.

So I bypassed her and went directly to the Jeju Air ticketing window. There was a sign on it that said something like "We only take money, we don't give any," so I immediately figured there'd be no refund forthcoming. It turned out I was right. When I got to the window there were three young, pretty girls dressed in the flattering, form-fitting, orangy Jeju Air uniforms. Pretty but useless.

The girl who "helped" me was absolutely gorgeous! I wonder if people are less likely to lose their shit with pretty young girls. I had seen her before. Not HER specifically and not SEEN specifically, but I knew this girl. Oh yeah.... back to my struggles with telecommunications! "Hello I would like to cancel my Telus cable please?" "I am sorry, you can't do that here. Is there something else I could do?" "What else can you do?" "Anything but cancel." "Well how can I cancel? I've tried the place where I signed up and I've tried the website, they both referred me to you." "I understand your confusion and frustration sir, but I regret to tell you that there is nothing I can do to help." IT WAS HER!!! Only she wasn't Filipino this time, she was Korean and she wasn't on the phone, she was in person. But essentially the same person. These are what I've labeled the "buffers." They are middlemen, or usually middlewomen, put between customers and people who have the abilities to HELP customers. They are not actually employees of the actual company, nor do they know any actual facts or have any actual information about the company. They are there to tell you how sorry they are for the inconvenience it is their livelihoods to create. The cult of inconvenience lesson 2: the buffers.

As you might expect, the gorgeous buffers were highly empathetic but just as highly unhelpful. So I got back on the train to go back to the travel agent's office in Itaewon. I got to Itaewon and had Mcdonald's breakfast for lunch. It was about 8:30 but remember I was up at 4 and had breakfast then. Now comes one of my sidetracks. Not quite as aside as my usual sidetracks, but still an aside. Take a guess how many Americans enjoy coffee every day. According to the good old interweb up to 73% of Americans drink coffee every day. The average person has 3 cups a day. Do you know how many drink WATER every day? About 75%. Yeah. Coffee is like water to the American. Now, how many of those Americans drink their coffee black? 20%. The vast majority of Americans "color" their coffee with cream, creamer, milk, or some dairy substitute. And I am one billion percent positive I have had Mcdonald's coffee in Korea with one of these:

But there is a fad that might be more popular than the cult of inconvenience here in Korea and that's coffee. Not REAL coffee but the trendy, expensive, maybe Italian-inspired, environmentally horrible bean juice that comes in the cups that people "on-the-go" think make them look busy and professional so much they sometimes carry empty ones around and pretend to caffeinate like little kids having a coffee party. You can tell what I think of those. I prefer Dunkin Donuts, Tim Horton, drip coffee. That's what it's called now. My music is called classic and my coffee is called drip. But that won't change me. I'm a classic drip. And although Mcdonald's HAS the uppety high-maintenance Americano coffee now with all it's additives, they still offer the drip coffee that's made in a pot with no "tamping" or "frothing" or fluffing or buffing. And they have actual milk that they put in the "lattes." Go figure since latte literally means milk. But I double dog dare you to try to get milk or cream or any kind of whitener or lightener in your coffee at Mcdonald's any more. It's just not done! It's really hard to get it anywhere actually! It just seems wrong to call it "Americano" and not offer milk which 80% of Americans put in it, especially at the most American restaurant in the world. I asked politely and in Korean if I could get milk in my coffee and got lied to. The Mcwench actually told me they don't have milk there. That's all I'm saying about that.

Except that it gave me another thing to be pissed off about on this day. So I made my way up the hill to my travel agent's office for the first time that morning. I had already reached my goal of 6000 steps. My phone doesn't record if they are uphill steps like in Itaewon or running steps like in the airport train transfer so I had more than my fair share of exercise for the day. One positive. Gotta cling to the positives sometimes. Ac centuate the positive e liminate the negative... If only life were a song!

As I am getting to the top of the hill where my travel agent (and damn near EVERYTHING in Seoul) is, I realized something: it was Friday. Being unemployed I lose track of the days of the week. Had I thought yesterday while buying my ticket that the next day was Friday it might have been enough to make me think twice about getting it. It seems like I always have this inconvenience when buying my air tickets. You see Friday is the Muslim holy day and my travel agent is a Muslim. It is not my purpose to start slagging all religion here but religion DOES seem to participate in the cult of inconvenience, does it not? How many Christians would rather be watching football on Sunday than sitting in church? I remember thinking of the absolute rip-off it was being all dressed up and in church during a large portion of my two days off of school per week every time I was forced to go to church. I daydreamed all through Sunday School about tobogganing and street hockey and bike riding and football and hockey card trading and mountain climbing and who would win a fight between Spiderman and Batman... I tell ya I've been inconvenienced enough by religion in my lifetime! But on this day it wasn't even MY religion that inconvenienced me. I got to the shop that Khawaja works out of and the door was locked and nobody was there. It was a cold day but there's a couch outside the shop so I took by backpack off and sat on the couch.

See the sign? And you can see the couch too... directly below the sign. What you CAN'T see are the pigeons that live in the neighbourhood. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. 

I sat on the couch unable to dial anybody with my crap phone plan and unsure if Khawaja had received the text messages I had been sending him since early in the morning from the airport.

Then my first bit of good luck for the day.

They say being shat on by a bird is good luck don't they? Well one of those pigeons landed on that sign, hung its arse over the edge and bombed me. 

I guess I was lucky. Here's how I have to reckon good luck in my life: You can see that the shit hit the steel railing and the corner of the couch. I just got the splatterings on my sock and pant leg, not the main load of the shit so yay, good luck for me! 

I shit you not, this really happened! 

Let me back up. I typed that I was unable to call Khawaja but that's not true. I had changed my phone the day before while waiting to get my ticket to Osaka. Just a couple doors down (or more accurately, UP) from the travel agency is a phone shop. It's run by another Muslim. I don't know where these guys are from but they speak several languages. Korean, Hindi, English, and some others. Probably Russian in there too. I asked the phone guy about it and he says you have to live and deal with folks all day long who speak Korean. That's how he learned. I have never done that or, frankly, wanted to do that. Anyway, he gave me a cheaper phone plan with unlimited calling and data. Friggin' Sokcho crappy phone plan DONE! So in reality THIS was the one positive to come from the whole story.

But it's not over yet. While waiting for Khawaja to get outta church I called the airline to see if I could get a refund for my ticket. I got the erstwhile "Our operators value your call but they value doing nothing just a little bit more..." Then suddenly somebody answered! It was a girl who couldn't speak English. This is Korea. All the English helpline workers can't speak English. I can tell you that in the time I've been here this has gotten worse, not better. They used to at least make an effort. But Korea is becoming MORE protectionist and less global in their own country and they expect people to use their language when they are here. Even if you don't particularly love being here.

The girl told me she'd get an English speaker to call me back. I said, "Sure you will," and hung up. To my surprise - convenience! An English speaking lady called me back! So I explained my situation and actually we had a good laugh together about my shitty day and I DID include the birdshit story you better believe it! She was nice, but not nice enough to give me good news. She said I probably wouldn't get much back, but she wasn't sure because... you guessed it, I would have to talk to the ticket issuer. Is this the way airlines do business now? They relinquish all responsibility for their tickets to the people who sell them? And the people who sell them? Do they get the airlines' refunds if someone misses a flight? And they have a choice of whether to share it with the ticket purchaser or not? Is this how it works? It was getting close to 1 PM. That's when my return flight from Osaka to Seoul was due to take off. Would I forfeit the refund if I didn't locate Khawaja by then? Is THIS why he wasn't answering my calls?

I wandered around Itaewon. To tell the truth I was looking for a beer but nothing is open in the morning in Itaewon. Nothing with beer anyway. I had a coffee at Paris Baguette. I asked politely in Korean if they could put a little milk in it. THEY DID!

The day was looking up. I would have rather had a beer. I would rather have had cream too, but it was a good cup of coffee. I wasn't even halfway through when I got a text from Khawaja that said he was at the shop and I should go back again. But I finished that coffee before doing so. 

It was my 4th trip up the hill to the travel agency but I finally got the deal settled. I only got the taxes back. I don't know if this is Jeju Air's rule or Khawaja's rule. He said the two parts of the trip are considered one ticket so I couldn't get a refund for the return ticket. Again, his rule or Jeju's? I think maybe he pocketed some money for the refund even though I worked just as hard as he did, maybe harder. But, travel agents are not looking out for our convenience either. What could I do? 300 bucks down the shitter! 

By the time I had received my refund - my paltry, insignificant refund - it was past noon. It was too early for supper and STILL none of the pubs were open. It would have been DAMNED convenient to have a place to grab a beer at noon on THAT day let me tell you! But it was probably better that there wasn't, so with my tail between my legs, pissed off, shat on, and fully shitkicked by the world and the cult of inconvenience, I slouched home to Incheon. 

Stay tuned for part two.