I get the best things in the mail
Korean life September 12th. 2008, 10:00pmThe National Korean Insurance agency sent me a special letter today. Contained in the envelop were two smaller envelopes with two different plastic bags inside them and a paper ice cream spoon. There were a few pages of Korean that I handed off to the wife, and I went to the restroom. She was reading the Korean instructions and then started laughing. “I know what this is!” she said.
She poked her head into the bathroom and said, “This is for you.”
“What?”
“This envelop is for a stool sample. They want you to fill up the small plastic bag full of your poo. Here, they even gave you a small paper spoon to scoop it for you. Normally, we just…”
“Wait, wait, wait…there is something you NORMALLY do with mail-in stool samples? You’ve done this before?”
“Yes, in the past we just used a newspaper next to the toilet, then moved it with wooden disposable chopsticks. They have these folded paper spoons right in the envelope now to use instead.”
“You…crap…on a newspaper?”
“Where else are you going to do it?” she asked, puzzled.
“Uh, how about in the toilet? Isn’t there some other way they can get this information?!”
“So, you aren’t going to do it then?” she said, somewhat disappointed.
“Are you kidding? Go to the bathroom in an envelope and then MAIL it to someone legally? It sounds like a revenge fantasy come true!”
The Korean government is interested in my shit. Literally. Being an international marriage (Me, an American, and wife, Korean) means that we get lumped into the services provided for all the mail order brides Korean men have taken. This service is to check foreign people with marriage visas from poorer countries that don’t have normal access to health care services. However, since I’m on the list, I get to participate too.
They say it is to increase the comfort of those foreign brides that stay in Korea by providing them with a free check up. Nothing says comfort to me like crapping in a small plastic bag and mailing it back to some strange office. Whoever handles that service’s mail has the new official worst job in Korea. Mailed in stool samples. Yuck.
2 Responses to “I get the best things in the mail”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
September 14th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Does this mean I can expect something similar? Maybe I’ll send something produced by the cat…
September 22nd, 2008 at 11:50 am
[...] I get the best things in the mail (A Geek in Korea) [...]