Korean Job Discussion Forums

[FistFace]

My school has been installing new cabling for internet and telephone. Of course, they're doing it the "Korean way" by stringing huge ugly-ass cables all over the outside of the building. Gotta hand it to 'em though, they're actually putting the cables in two big, thick bendable conduit pipes (that look like hell) and hanging them over and around the buildings here (we live next to the school).

They have needed inside of/on top of my house for 3 days now to work on this. Of course, ZERO notice was given. Nothing like having a group of workers show up at your door at 9am and declare that they need to work on your house "for a few hours," and then they stay 3 days -- coming and going various random times over a 2 week period with no notice. That's the Korean way, and knowning how my school works, if they don't get it done, well, they'll get around to it sometime before next semester.

In the meantime, I have no internet and no home phone line. I don't care to leave my house, PS3, big PDP, computers, and $1200 in movies open to a plethora of under-educated wire installers walking in and out at all times of the day.

So I have to stay home whenever they come. This means that my plans for the day must change until they leave -- which never is as early as they say it will be.

So they show up unannounced at 10am yesterday, after a mysterious 4 day hiatus. None of them speak English, and the technical jargon far surpassed my Korean ability. We finally got ahold of someone to interpret. They said they planned on working for "one hour" to finish up. The catch was that I was supposed to stick around, because he'd "call me after lunch so he could get inside."

So, time passes.

My gf comes over so we can go out for dinner around 5:00.

A guy FINALLY shows up at 5:15, so we wait for him to finish.

He works for 45 minutes, and promptly takes his dinner break.

By now, I'm pretty pissed about having to wait around, and that he took a break before finishing, so I let her do the talking. He tells her he has "another hour or two" left, and we should just give him a time to come back after we eat. Fair enough. We decide on about 8pm. We eat, and come back. He comes in to work. I warn them that I've spent a lot of my own money on wallpaper (I didn't want the boring crap white they always put in Korean apartments).

The first thing he does is start cutting holes in the window frame. Before this, he wanted to just string the wire through the window (typical slap and run Korean wiring job) and call it done. I have lived here a long time, and anticipated this. I prefer to be able to close my windows from bugs in summer and snow in winter.

The next thing this fruitball does, before I get a chance to see what he's doing, is pull the adhesive backing off of a big piece of stick-on conduit for the wires.

You can guess what he does: without thinking or measuring, he slaps this sticky conduit onto my new wallpaper. It wasn't even close to straight. Gotta give the guy credit. He actually noticed it wasn't straight. So just as the words are coming out of my mouth to stop him from doing what I could see what's coming next...

HE RIPS THE CONDUIT OFF OF MY WALL, TAKING MY 300,000 won WALLPAPER JOB WITH IT! Big tears of gray wallpaper stuck to the conduit. Big white gashes now show where the wallpaper was torn off.

That was it. I unloaded a verbal swearing assault on the guy, and damn near threw him out of the 3rd story window.

It was all I could do keep myself from splattering this guy's blood all over the rest of the wallpaper. The stupid *beep*! Then he has the nerve to act like he's done nothing wrong.

My gf was shocked at his stupidity as well. He explained that he wanted to put the conduit somewhere else, because "it would be more work" to route wires where he stuck it. THEN WHY THE HELL DID YOU STICK IT THERE!?!?

Amazing the level of stupidity that these installers have.

Then a few minutes later, this guy starts hemming and hawing to my girlfriend about how it's late, and he wants to come back tomorrow.

No way.

We made the stupid ass stay until 11pm (which is how long this "1 hour job" took him to do).

[shaunew]

I had the same thing with air con installers. The guy was half retarded I think. He just wanted to run the pipe in between the sliding doors. So I ask him what about the big opening. He tells me to put up some cardboard. I threw him out and paid some one else to finish the job. The other guy wanted 30,000 for the work I told him to bugger off.

[FistFace]

Yeah, my coworker actually has the "nerve" to be gone on vacation during her vacation.

I thought the installer guy was going to start crying when he heard he wasn't going to be able to get into her apartment to finish his work this week.

Always amazes me that Koreans (and yes, I feel perfectly comfortable generalizing here) DON'T realize that it might actually be helpful to CALL AHEAD and make sure someone is going to be home before they attempt to get in for repairs.

Much less to allow the person to plan for it.

[jaganath69]

Can sympathize, that theme has been played over again and again in my time here. Calling on you last minute to do something that takes no consideration of your life and plans seems to be the national sport.

[nautilus]

Koreans put up with that Kr@p because they think its all for the general good of the country. Sacrifice the interests of the individual for that of the building, or something

[TheUrbanMyth]

I'm disappointed. The title of your post clearly states you killed a Korean and that you almost went to jail. Yet I didn't see anything remotely resembling the title in your post.

[Gemfinder]

Have you tried having your boss call the company to let them know that they have to call your cell or email you in advance and show up on time or they won't get let in? If your phone is out they should call your school and set a time convenient to you first. You're probably expected to do the same thing if your running late by calling ahead and always showing up to work on time. They need to reciprocate if they want to get any work done.

[KumaraKitty]

We just moved into a brand new apartment under a 2 year lease. The owner and my husband inspected everything before signing off, so that we don't get dinged for any charges at the end of contract that were the builders fault. One section of our wood floor is hollow underneath, so the builders agreed to come fix it. A week later, one guy shows up as I'm headed to class. He drills a hole into the floor, then asks me for a plastic bowl. He needs it to catch the fumes from the filler he's going to inject into the floor, and it needs to be thrown out after. I reply I don't have any disposable plastic bowls, maybe he should have brought one. After 15 minutes of him hemming and hawing, and me mentioning REPEATEDLY I don't have one, I must go, I'm late, etc., he finally left. He has never come back despite repeated requests. So the floor is still hollow and can't be stepped on, and now it has a whole drilled in it. We've lived here 1 1/2mths so far. My husband asks the A/S centre once a week to send him, and they always say they will.
Drives me mad how blatantly they disregard things here!

[pkang0202]

I think contract workers/installers are retarded everywhere, not just in Korea. back home, I asked Comcast to install cable jacks on the 2nd floor of my house. The installers came, and instead of wiring the existing wall plates with coax, they took out a drill and drilled a hole from the outside of the house, directly into the bedroom and ran a wire from the hole in my wall directly to the TV. Their response was:

"Sorry, Comcast doesn't snake wires through walls. You gotta pay $100 an hour for a guy to do that."

Thanks a lot buddy, maybe you could've told me that BEFORE you drilled a half inch hole through my house.

[FUBAR]

[koon_taung_daeng]

yea that title was way to misleading, i think you should apologize, or go out and kill a korean

[demi]

Why do so many people on this site always talk about the 'beating they nearly gave some Korean guy'. What a load of cr@p! It's all talk. I never see a post about someone actually thumping a guy, it's just always talk.

[Yaya]

I ordered cable TV last year. I was told that the technician would come between 2-4 p.m. I made sure I was home between those hours. He didn't come by 4 p.m. and I had something to do, so I left. He then calls me at 4:30 p.m. and asks me where I am. I am furious and start yelling at him on the phone, telling him that I #$#@!! waited two hours for him to come.

Then again, cable "service" in Los Angeles also gave me white hair, too.

[FistFace]

As much as I like to have fun with the Korean apologists on here, I'm sorry that you feel shortchanged and that nobody died.

Sorry I didn't really kill anyone. I'll leave that to the Korean bar gangsters.

On another note, when the green kitchen wallpaper was installed, they slopped white glue all over it, which dried and left big white smears. I raised hell, and then came over, and then whined that I'd bothered with it.

I pay you 300,000 extra (above the base white paper cost paid by the school) to wallpaper my place, then you at least better damn-well do it right, or you'll have your ass over to my house AGAIN to fix it.

Yeah, there are definitely some "tools" for installers around the world. Back in the USA, I changed the gutters and evespouts my house. I called the cheapest company in the book, and the guys came out and started hammering/prying the spouts off with the claw parts of the hammers -- never mind the metal siding they gouged up (badly) behind it! I damn-near had their ass in court, and got the job done for next to free.

That installer was just contracting with those bozos, and I doubt they ever worked for him again.

So it's not just Korea where this type of thing happens, but it sure seems to be much more COMMON (my experience) in this country.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

I don't know how many times I've heard varients of that story, whether it's the water, ondol, TV cable, or whatever. Here's a letter that went back and forth between my friend and his Korean employer (who supposedly lived in the US for 12 years and should have no trouble understanding English) about his water problem. His employer kept giving it back to him wanted more and more information, and after many visits by clueless repairmen here's the final result: