NUMBERS
I had a serious fight with the Korean Main Contractor last Thursday.
Despite executing my job, I was ashamed in the meeting in front of Clients and Consultants, whereas the Korean Manager and his assistant, complaint that we delayed in doing a coring job (basically making holes for pipes to punch thru floors).
Basically the Korean Manager threw paper to my face losing his emotion.
I replied in a dumb-looking face and said “ Well sir, we already marked on site all the points, and we sent inspection forms on 22 february but nothing was coming from your side, no inspections arranged and we waiting for approval before proceeding”
He threw a tantrum in front of the Consultants and Clients, thinking my reply is shaming him, and instruct his Assistant Manager to check with me the “marked points” on site right away. He basically told everyone that I lied just to save my ass.
Well, that 6pm, I went with the Korean Assistant Manager.
I showed him all the marked points, took pictures in Whatsapp and forward it to the Whatsapp groups.
Basically I screamed back at the Korean Assistant Manager when I showed him the points because I was really pissed off.
“Why you simply say things without checking?”
We had an argument up there at site, when we realised, there’s nobody there at site at that time. It was 6.30pm.
Suddenly he looked frightened. I guess he realised if I lost my logic, I might do something to him then.
Some fight, some accident, some killing incident might have happen.
Both of us quickly went down.
In the driveway, it was raining. both of us sat in the concrete kerbs,
He asks me why I lost my mind. It was a job, for God’s sake.
I told him I give 100 percent to this project and yet I’m treated like an asshole. We did our job.
He told me it’s a job. What he meant is that since it’s a job, you shouldn’t expect compliment if you did good. If you did bad, you’ll be screwed.
I told him I don’t expect thank you words or those compliment shit. But if you screwed people like this, people are people, even animals bite back if you try to screw it.
Then I look into his stupid eyes and realised something.
This Korean guy is trapped in a corporate world mentality. No wonder this guy, despite older than me, doesn’t know much shit about Mechanical. He doesn’t bother to learn. He just executes and get paid. If blamed, point others.
Koreans are different than Japanese because in Korea, the conglomerate companies rules.
All the small medium companies (SME’s) are swollen up by these conglomerates as subsidiaries companies.
These results in the workers being in a huge hierarchy.
The Koreans would rather kill themselves in suicide than resigning because if they resign, their names will be blacklist among the conglomerates subsidiaries.
That’s why you will hear stories about abuse and bullying in Korean companies.
The problem is, when this happens, you are valued as numbers.
Nothing but numbers.
Honestly, I wrote this post after typing and printing my resignation letter. But I guess I will discuss with my boss first before doing anything.
(Life preferred to stronger)
When (wings gather at the site)
In the mirror of eternity
Different colors different (lives)
And we're never gonna find the answer in a normal way
Staring at the walls of life, soon they will decay
Is our life just decadence or selfish style
Are we just numbers in a forgotten file?