::A Geek in Korea::

Two of the five teachers I work with won’t be around by the end of the month. The program we currently run won’t be in effect in three months time. The entire school will be remodeled and the floor above ours will be bought, scrapped, remodeled, and then filled with students. All of this is happening because we got bought by a Seoul franchise. Today was that franchise’s chance to “sell” to the current parents of the school.

The franchise did it in a pretty smart way. They bought time at the nearest convention center/wedding hall and set up a luncheon to invite the parents to see the ins and outs of the new program. They had our school call EVERYONE that had ever attended the school and tell them that there was FREE BUFFET FOOD for anyone willing to sit through an informational meeting about the school’s restructuring. They talked about it weekly about how nice and expensive the food buffet per person was supposed to be. 23,000 won per person was the quote I heard repeatedly.

Considering people will get on a bus, be driven to a crappy wedding hall in the middle of nowhere, watch a wedding of two people they’ve never met, eat a buffet for free, then be driven back home on the same bus, there is a pretty good chance that if you pick a site closer to their homes with decent food, people will show up for a buffet.

We, the teaching staff, were told to show up half an hour early to help out with everything. When I arrived, I was given a Miss America-like sash, which said what the new school was going to be. My coworkers and I were the greeters at the door. We had to hand them an informational booklet which was for the long slideshow. They wrote down their names and phone numbers, then got shown a seat.

I didn’t have to do anything except nod at people at the door. I showed up at 10:30 am. The meeting was supposed to start at 11:00 am, but considering people don’t even bother to show up on time for weddings, there was no way anyone was going to be ready to give the speech by then. We waited ten more minutes, then my director got up to talk.

She went on for thirty minutes about how she thought the new school franchise was a good fit for their program, and how she was won over by their design. She rambled on and on. Then, she was replaced by the franchise salesman?/manager?/regional director?

He started off his speech at 11:40ish. He went on, AT LENGTH, about every single freaking powerpoint slide he had made. Every level. Ever difference BETWEEN the levels. What do they do in class. Why is it important. Homework. Online homework. Classwork. Foreign teachers. Studying abroad. Work. Advice. Strategy to learn. Etc.

All of this was done in Korean with a peppering of English buzzwords. The funniest thing for the foreign teachers was that there was a group of levels called “L-S”. He talked about levels “L-S-A” through “L-S-C”. Then he went to describe what they would be doing in “L-S-D” class. We had a chuckle.

The entire time, there were NO seats made available for any of the teachers. We had to stand at the door and greet late arrivals, and also look like we wanted to be listening to this boring speech. The poor Korean teachers had to actually listen to the boring stuff. No one but the speaker was on the stage, thankfully. I just messaged my wife about the status of the steam trays in the back of the room. I was hungry.

The speech was surprisingly long and detailed. He spoke until 12:30 or so. It was a long time to be on my feet as sick as I was. I had to keep ducking out into the hall to blow my nose. Eventually he turned over the hall to the food service. There was a MAD DASH for plates. It’s almost comical to see that Korean parents are EXACTLY like Korean children. They have no idea how to make a line and just crowd up at the starting point so nothing gets accomplished. It’s what happens EVERY SINGLE DAY at the elevator. I think the kids might even be better than the parents.

Anyway, the parents started eating around 12:45. The entire hall was full, so the teachers had to sit and watch them eat. We asked if we could grab food and join a table, but our director strictly forbid us from touching the food. As long as anyone on the floor wanted food, we weren’t allowed to eat. It was torturous. Everyone was walking by us with food, eating, snacking on raw seafood, or nice meat dishes, and we just had to grin and hob knob with them.

Initially, she said that there would be new food for us to eat, but that didn’t make sense. If they were serving a VIP group of people, like the teachers, Korean manners would dictate that EVERYONE else would have had to gone, because other people would have felt slighted. “Why didn’t I get that special food at the buffet?” There was no way we wanted to wait for the entire place to clear out, because then the time would be up and they wouldn’t want to pay for time on the entire hall just for a handful of teachers.

After thirty to fourty minutes of being teased, an entire table opened up, and people started leaving. We were allowed to grab something from the buffet. By this time all the food had been sitting out for three hours, and my enthusiasm for raw fish tends to wane pretty quickly. I grabbed some stuff and headed for a table. I was pretty hungry, but that meal wasn’t worth the wait. I had ice cold raw tuna for the first time. Some of my coworkers had their share of raw beef, but I couldn’t imagine eating any of that without a family member forcing me.

After the long speech and the long wait for lunch, it was time to go…to work! Today was a long one.

My foreign coworker kept asking my Korean coworkers if he thought there was a “sale”, or if this was a really convincing plan for the mothers. They were very…non-commital. There was some money being spent, but no real communication on their end to explain to us what we’d be doing. I guess that is supposed to happen at a “training seminar”, but if it’s exactly like this when we go to Seoul, I’ll be asleep before it even begins.