Watching the backs of my coworkers as they leave without regret

 

The moment the revolving door spins, time seems to slow down suddenly, and I am able to carefully see the expressions of people around me. A group of people who look indifferent, but whose eyes are filled with exhaustion and resignation, apathetically entering the company’s main doors—it is the scene of Monday morning, a scene which I have become familiar with at some point since I’ve started working at the company.

 

The memory of yelling out in an Internet café after finding my name in the list of the applicants that were accepted to the company has faded away like the faces of my elementary school friends whose names have become fuzzy. Only the Monday-disease, which every office worker has, remains as vivid reality. The employee who has been working for 3 years and who is lost, with no idea what she is living for—that is me.

 

▲ I’ve been working at a major company for 3 years. These days, more and more coworkers are leaving. ©Sumin

 

I don’t know whether it’s because I’ve reached the first stage of the 3rd, 6th, and 9th years of working, which are said to be when you are tempted to quit, but recently there have been more members of my cohort that have left the company. They probably harbor a sense of anxiety while leaving, but the reason why I also envy that image of their departure and just can’t get it out of my mind probably isn’t just because I’m sick of office life.

 

The words of an employee of a subcontracting business: “Ms. OO, we’re in a difficult situation these days, too”

 

Of course, when I first started working at the company, I was full of dreams and ambitions. Although I didn’t know a lot about fashion, I was interested in clothes. So, determined to learn, I joined a major fashion enterprise, the name of which everyone would recognize once they heard it. Starting out in the sales department and moving to the product planning department, I worked hard. Although it was not an atmosphere where I could request wages for working overtime at night, I worked overtime, night after night, without questioning it. I lost out on time for myself, which had been of foremost importance to me, but still, I enjoyed it and I was happy.

 

The moment I realized that I was changing came when I was negotiating with an employee of a subcontracting company. The person said, “Ms. OO, we’re in a difficult situation these days too. We can’t even afford to turn down offers that, for us, only mean losing money... I’m considering quitting too.” The face of that employee, who wasn’t even around my mom’s age, overlapped with my mom’s face, which was always full of exhaustion from life. From her, I could feel the heavy weight of life that had made my mom thinner and thinner as she had to bring me and my younger sibling up all by herself when we were in middle and high school.

 

To be honest, I still should have made them take the offer, even if it meant coaxing or threatening. Even though I knew that our offer would only cause the subcontracting business to lose money compared to if they took another company’s offer, I was still supposed to force them to take on the project by vaguely sugar-coating it, saying that they would be able to get other projects more easily if they did this project from a “major” enterprise. That was my job. But that day, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

 

A few weeks later came the day when I was to consult with that company. Another person, not the woman I was used to talking to, entered the conference room. The other woman had eventually quit, I was told. I was also told that during a meeting with people higher up in our company, an executive had verbally abused many workers from the subcontracting company. I shook my head side to side at the ignorance of committing such absurd violence, not even only towards their own employees but to the employees of other companies because they were from a smaller one, but there was nothing I could do.

 

Between heaven and earth - the vertical structure of communication in this place

 

Before I know it, the familiar everyday routine comes to me as something I can’t recognize. The company’s atmosphere that takes it for granted that smaller business will bow their heads, the attitude of most of the employees that ‘if they say so from up there, you do it.’ An executive throws a cell phone in a meeting where the team leaders have gathered, under the pretext of low company performance, and the team leaders return to their teams and torture them in turn. False reports, that look good on the outside but are far from reality, are and must be submitted to please the bosses.

 

This is a place with a vertical structure of communication - as if between heaven and earth - where most are oblivious to current problems or dilemmas caused by certain projects. You may be working as you were ordered to, when suddenly you have to shift directions with no reason but that your superior told you to, and if it continues you may end up having to do the same thing 10 times. There is no way of knowing how the company is functioning. I’m sick of it. My head pounds. What the hell am I doing here...

 

That was the me I discovered – one who couldn’t take anymore. Bam! I heard something collapsing. The me I discovered was a dull image, not water, not soda, but ‘2%’ [a tagline from the commercial of the drink called ‘2%’ in Korea]. Even witnessing something unjust, I would think, "Well, there’s nothing I can do...’ Even when listening to unreasonable “logic,” I would think, “Well, they won’t listen to me anyway even if I try to speak to them...”

 

I wasn’t that kind of person when I was at school. I had been the type of person who wasn’t embarrassed to laugh out loud or sit down and cry in the middle of the street; the kind of person who knew how to assert what she thought was right and struggle against what she thought was wrong. I had been that free a person. And I liked that kind of me, since there aren’t many people in the world that can laugh when they want to and cry when they want to. So my friends had laughed a lot when they heard that I was to join a major company. But now I had become a drab salary man who had assimilated into the enterprise culture. Bam!

 

Some people will say that I’m just complaining. In this era where the topic of the unemployment of young people has become common to the extent of being boring, there will be people who say that my complaints about my present situation in which I have a job at a major company, earn enough money to live pretty well, and can make my mom proud, are the luxuries of the well-off.

 

But I have lost myself. I have lost the dream that I could talk about all night without tiring and my courage, which I had been determined never to let falter, and all I got in return was a sharpened interest in money. I am not happy at all. Right now, my self-esteem is crawling along the floor. Even when I didn’t have anything and went hungry two days in a row, I had never been ashamed of myself... but now the moment to be ashamed of myself has come.

 

Silent revolt

 

This doesn’t mean that I have the decisiveness to immediately get up and walk out. I think of my mom’s face as she wiped away tears from her guilt of not being able to afford to send me to cram school, my mom’s hands that tucked crumpled up pocket money into my hands when I was leaving Busan for college, and the sound of her dry cough when she had come all the way to Seoul just to be at her daughter’s college graduation. Even if I did walk out, I know too well that my mom, while saying, “You probably had a good reason to do that,” would be swallowing bitter water inside. So I press down my surge of impulsion and resume my seat for the moment.

 

And I’m just silently resisting for the present. When we order the production of samples from sewing factories, I give them a little more of the sample expenses than the company’s standards, under the pretext that the factory requested it and it’s required under the Subcontracting Law. If we develop new subsidiary material with subsidiary material companies, I give them the developing expenses they request without negotiating, even though the amount is a bit high, as it has been set while taking into consideration the usual practice of price negotiation.

 

I try to listen, even just for a while, to the complaints and choked up voices of the people working at subcontracting companies, and share our hardships over a cup of warm tea. I try to recover my lowly self-esteem through such small things and motivate myself again.

 

I don’t know how long I will continue to work here. Even if not right now, I too want to leave without turning back someday. Even if it’s while harboring some anxiety. What I’m sure of is that I, as a person who can laugh more, cry more, and has more courage to talk of many more things, will be much happier than the I of before and the I of right now.

   

Published: April 2, 2014

Translated by Rose

* Original article: http://ildaro.com/6639

 

◆ To see more English-language articles from Ilda, visit our English blog(https://ildaro.blogspot.com).

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