Today was one of those days where had I been in America, or if I was a Korean, it would have been a hell of a lot easier. Nothing extremely heinous happened, it was more a series of hella annoying events than a “I hate this country” series of events.
As you may or may not know, in Korea cellphones are a way of life. Everyone (including Buddhist priests and kindergarten students) have cellphones. So, like a good denizen of Korea, I have my stupid little phone, but due to my foreign status, I can only use my phone if I pre-pay for a certain ammount of time (like 10,000 won and I can use my phone for an hour). When I use up my time, I am no longer able to make phone calls (but I can still recieve them). So that went down last night, and I knew I had to head to the phone company. It’s a tad annoying to have to do this, but it’s not really a big deal. All I have to do is just go to the phone company office prior to my calligraphy class, plunk down my money and my phone is in business.
Now in Korea there are offices for the cellphone companies all over the place, except for the subway station I usually depart from. So I walk over to Shinchon station (which is further from my house and my ultimate final destination). I walk into the phone company’s office and tell them that I need to pay. It turns out that the computer system required to let me make a local phone call doesn’t become operational until 11:00 (it was 10:20 at the time). Since I didn’t have time to wait around, I headed off to the subway station and adventure…just in time to miss the train.
I waited for 10 minutes before the next train arrived. I get on, and as the train departed I realized I was going the wrong direction. Not a big deal, I’ll just transfer at the next station, a station I arrive at just in time to miss the train. So I wait 10 more minutes for another train. It’s then 10 more minutes to my destination (it’s only 2 minutes from the station I usually depart from). By the time I arrive at the station, there’s only about 20 minutes of class time left (which would have ended up being about 15 minutes by the time I got out of the labarith-like subway station).
I don’t really have enough time to go to class (5 minutes preparing, 5 minutes cleaning up leaves a scant 5 minutes in which to practice), but I also realize that if I carry on to work, I’ll be extremely early, so I decided to kill some time at the crazy 1,000 won ($1) store in the station (the one that sells nunchucks and knock-off Pringles from Indonesia). This plan falls through since the shop is not yet open yet…wtf dudes?! It’s friggin’ 11:00 dudes, where you at yo? So with nothing else to do, I head off to work.
Now this whole, annoying, inconvient scenario could have been avoided if I could have recieved a phonebill like a normal human being, instead of having to go to the phone company and juice it up everytime I want to make a call.
