an utter fucking waste of time

[Originally posted on Friday, June 23, 2017, at 4:29PM.]

Last night, around 9PM, my boss called me up and said I'd need to attend a company-wide event taking place at noon the following day. I groaned inwardly but said yes, I'd be there—not that I had any choice. (My coworker, the lucky bastard, got Friday off to prep for his Saturday departure for the Philippines, so he was able to skip today's event.)

The event was a massive teleconference involving all seven cities in which our company has branches—a company that I've been calling "the Golden Goose" for the past couple of years. Just along the street I work on, in the Daechi-dong neighborhood of Seoul, there are three separate branches of the Golden Goose. Almost everyone from all three branches was there today, in a huge room occupying most of the floor of our "Parthenon" branch (our branches and programs are given strangely myth-related names), and on a huge screen at the front of the room, we could see video of the assembled workers from the branches in six other cities. The only positive observation I can make about the meeting is that, if you were Korean, then you probably enjoyed the three long hours. There was plenty of laughter at rapidfire jokes that went over my head, and some of the people who spoke (only some) remembered to lace their spiels with humor.

Otherwise, the entire event felt like a goddamn waste of time. Here's my introvert's standard for judging whether a meeting or event is useful: can the contents of the meeting/event be conveyed in an email? If the answer is yes, then there's no reason to gather. Today, alas, was a big yes to that question: there wasn't a single thing said during the event that couldn't have been written down and shotgunned to us staffers in a long memo. But this is Korea, where wasting time and company inefficiency have been elevated to an art form. I had to sit through nearly three fucking hours of speeches, lectures, chanting, and seemingly random applause. It probably would have helped my experience had I understood more Korean, but I fear that, even if I had understood more, the event would still have felt unproductive.

I've said it before in other posts: lecturing is the absolute worst way to convey information. I don't care how compelling a speaker you think you are: if you're lecturing, you're doing it wrong. (And yes, I could be called a hypocrite for writing at length, since that's merely a printed form of lecturing.) Want to engage people? Then stop lecturing and get your listeners actively involved—bodily and intellectually—in whatever point you're trying to make. Alas, the Korean notion of "engagement" is to stop the lecture, make the audience chorally repeat key words and phrases, then continue lecturing. This happened several times throughout the three hours; I didn't follow the crowd.

Our company's CEO had the floor for most of the event. He's a nice enough guy in person, but his lecture struck me as a sort of dramatic irony, i.e., the kind of irony in which the character in a story is unaware of the irony, but the audience is fully aware. The CEO lectured about language-teaching philosophy, and he actually said many things I agreed with, including the idea that teachers need to engage the students and encourage them to think instead of merely memorizing and parroting information. He also emphasized the need to make learning more free-form and less structured, another point I agree with. I call all this inadvertently ironic, though, because I'm pretty sure that that's exactly what's not happening in our company's classrooms, especially when a Korean person is doing the teaching. Part of the problem is the teacher's own English competency: many of our teachers—as is true at most hagweons in Korea—just aren't very fluent in English. As a result, they're not ready to judge the quality of student output: students might say something that sounds completely out of bounds to a non-fluent teacher, but which is in fact perfectly fine from the point of view of a native speaker.

Anyway, I came away from this experience having learned nothing new. If anything, and this may have to do with my being an introvert, I came away feeling a sort of creepy, cultish vibe: our CEO, like Donald Trump, likes to name things after himself (imagine an American CEO named Smith creating programs like "Smith's Essay Writing" and "Smith's Approach to Proper Grammar," etc.), and his image, along with sundry quotes and slogans, is permanently and gigantically displayed all over the walls of the various branches in a manner reminiscent of the Kimist cult north of the DMZ. Our live video feed showed us that faculty and staff in other cities had created ass-kissing "We Love You!" signs for the CEO, who seems not to mind all the attention he gets, however ginned-up that attention might be. I noticed with some amusement that the Western staffers in the other cities' branches shared my general lack of enthusiasm at being on camera and in a time-wasting setting: the foreigners didn't chant or clap nearly as lustily as the natives did.

You might be reading this and thinking that I'm just napalming the company I work for, ungratefully biting the hand that feeds me. If that's your impression, I apologize. To be clear, I generally like my current job and my current boss, and that's partly because I don't normally attend stupid, useless events like this one. Today was, in fact, the first such event at which my attendance was deemed mandatory after having worked at the Golden Goose for nearly two years. My hope is that this will be the last such mandatory event for a long, long while, because there's little in life that's more painful than sitting in a place you don't want to be, conscious that moments of your existence are slipping away, wasted and unrecoverable.