Korean Job Discussion Forums

[crazylemongirl]

A whole bunch of public school teachers in my city live in the same building but work at different schools. The building is reasonably new and most of us are the first or second tennants of said apartment which the city hall owns and lets the schools' rent out.

My level of apartments have major problems of water leakage. My neighbor's apartment has a 30 centimeter brown spot where there is obviously water leaking through. I have a trail along my kitchen wall too. Water runs clear down the wall in my other neighbors apartment during monsoon season when the drains get too congested. The city government has come around tut tutted but hasn't actually done anything about it.

My apartment has been outlet problems for 6 months but the guys come around do some bandaid solution. Declare the problem fixed and as soon as they are out the door again outlet shorts out. So now I have to run an extenstion cord across my kitchen to power my fridge because the problem isn't always aware to them.

So friday morning my alarm didn't go off because of some stupid power cut and I'm standing in my bathroom come shower stall waiting for my hot water to come on. All I'm greeted with is a cold water.

On further investigation I find that my boiler isn't showing any signs of life. Call my neighbor and she is spitting tacks as she has only one outlet going (fourtantly to the fridge) and her lights.

Fourtantly there's a sauna on the way to school with a plentiful supply of hot water for a bargain price of a few thousand won.

I leave my neighbors trying to coax the fuse to reset itself but they were unsucessful. So I go into to school to investitgate it. I'm the lucky one who gets to go back to the apartment with my schools' maintence guy and see what is going on.

"You have to push this reset button," he says looking at me like I'm idiot. I told him we had done that repeatedly.

"oh well perhaps you shouldn't be running so many appliances". The power outage happend during the middle of the night when no one was using the electricty.

"Well the only reason for this could be water being somewhere' well we've told you how much this building leaks.

Last night the same fuse blew with no one home in two out of three of the apartments. We've unplugged everything that's connected to that fuse and it's still not reseting. It's sunday and none of us have any hot water nor washing machines and no likelyhood of anything until at least tuesday.

So why oh why do these people leave little problems unattended until they become huge messes? Grrrrrrrrrr.

Suppose I should be lucky this isn't winter.

[eamo]

I'm of the belief Koreans don't do maintenance. They just wait until a building has fallen to bits and nothing works anymore. Then they knock it down and build a new one.

If they put as much effort into maintenance as they do into checking gas outlets......What is with that? They're knocking on my door every other month!! "Gas-uh! Gas-uh!".

[pollyplummer]

Do you guys have Korean co-teachers at your school or a specific manger in charge of you? Whenever I have problems, I tell my co-teacher who often forgets and doesnt report my problems. I continue to bring it up to him every day until something gets done. Yes, you feel like a nag, but they get the idea. Heck, they should help you out. They're your school. They're Korean. They speak Korean. They should be able to call the right people who can get the job done. So yeah, I feel for ya, cause I have these things go on from time to time.

You have a bunch of public school teachers living in the same building? I think that sounds cozy!! Do you guys eat together? I kind of wish I had other foreingers living in my building. At least you guys can all talk about this stuff together and maybe try to help each other out.

[weatherman]

Foreigners living in dodgy housing placed in by the government? Oh, you must be living in a different Korea. Dae-Han-Min-Guk, Dae-Han-Min-Guk.

The only time I ever lived in dodgy housing was when I worked for the government. Otherwise, my housing has never even been middle class, but it has always been error free unlike your situation now. Sorry to hear about all of this.

[crazylemongirl]

[crazylemongirl]

just tried the fuse and it's back up again. ahsa!

[JongnoGuru]

[chiaa]

Did not happen to me, but one of my coworkers.

She lived in a giant office tel building. Perhaps thirty floors and at least 20 office tels on each floor. Most of the people lived in that building, did not use it for an office.

The turned off the water for A MONTH! That's right, no water for a whole month.

What could possibly happen that would make a building not have water for a month...

[Mr. Literal]

[Ya-ta Boy]

[crazylemongirl]

And sure enough this morning there is no hot water to be had....

[Mr. Literal]

[JongnoGuru]

[crazylemongirl]

I went into school today and explained the problem to my maintence guy (he's on his miltiary service but having spent 10 years in the states has flawless english).

He came around today and has acknowledged that, yes there is a problem.

The city government is now having a meeting to decide if they should call an electrician. As the schools and city hall are playing the blame game over who is responsible for all of this, as city hall owns the building but we are employed by the schools.

The funny thing is all four teachers on this floor have all completed one contract and re-signed so we have saved the city at least 4 million in airfares alone so there must be some money somewhere to pay for this work.

My school may eventually just call in an electrican and then let them squabble over the bill later. At the moment we are at 5 days with nothing done about this.

[Grotto]

Koreans and thinking rationally....I never thought to use them in the same sentence.

It has been getting warmer lately and quite humid. For some strange reason all of the fans in the classrooms have covers over them. Today I went into all my grade 3 classrooms and removed the covers, took apart the fans and got the students to wash the fans off. Put them back together and started teaching my lessons.

The students were quite happy about it, instead of a stuffy, humid, hot classroom they had a breezy cool classroom.

Now the maintenance guys were supposed to do this last week but in every classroom I have gone in everyone just sits and sweats. During breaks students run to the washrooms and douse themselves with cold water,

What is even more funny is the Korean teachers didnt even know the fans could be taken apart for cleaning. They were all amazed that I knew how and asked me where I had learnt such a thing. When I questioned one teacher he told me that when a fan gets too dirty he throws it out and gets a new one