bullet dodged... for now

[Originally posted on August 22, 2017, at 5:10PM.]

My boss told me last night that we workers had all been invited by the CEO to a mandatory hwaeshik (standard, and unsatisfactory, romanization: hoesik), i.e., a company outing usually involving dinner and, probably, drinking. I don't drink, and I'm not particularly sociable, and like you, I don't think the words "invite" and "mandatory" really go together, so as you can guess, I wasn't thrilled to find out that my Wednesday evening has been planned out completely without my consent. Office dinners and weekend team-building activities are bullshit wastes of time, as far as I'm concerned. Koreans—or at least Korean bosses—apparently love such activities because (1) Koreans tend to be reflexively sociable, group-first creatures, and (2) such events promote the illusion that the employees are part of a large family. In truth, quite a few Korean employees secretly despise these activities as well, but they're too conditioned or socialized to moan and groan about them publicly.

I joked to my coworkers, who found out about Wednesday's activity only this morning, that I'd had time to go through the five stages of grief and had finally reconciled myself to wasting time at this fucking dinner. Later on, our boss came in and announced that the hwaeshik had been moved to two Thursdays from now: the CEO, who is often mercurial, had suddenly cancelled on all of us. Bullet dodged... for now. The event was supposed to take place at a restaurant that our company owns and runs; it's in an out-of-the-way location on the periphery of Seoul, which means that we'd all probably have to drive together in our supervisors' cars and/or take cabs over. I openly stated to my coworkers that I'm going to find out what public transportation is available in that area, then I'm going to leave the restaurant after an hour and head on home by bus, subway, and/or cab. No reason for me to stay longer than I have to at a function I've been forced to attend.

UPDATE: I've looked at Naver Map, and the walk back to my apartment is 19.86 km. That's about 12.4 miles, or a little over four hours' schlepping. I'll be walking back to my place, then, getting home around 1AM. There's a subway station not far from the restaurant, which is located on the edge of Gwacheon City and not far from Anyang City's center. Other coworkers who might want to escape from the dinner early can take a cab to Line 4's Indeokweon Station, then take the subway, with a couple transfers, back to Daecheong Station.