what the hell, man?

[This post was written on Saturday, June 22, 2024, at 11:30 p.m.]

My blog is the place where I get things off my chest, and every once in a while, I have to write about something that might embarrass—or at least discomfit—someone else, and I have to do this without getting caught. So here I am, once again, writing one of my "frank" posts, tucked away in this 1999 archive. The topic is only tangentially work-related because I'm going to talk about my former coworker, an American I'll simply call M.

Back almost two years ago, when it seemed our group was going to be split up, with the boss being let go and the rest of us shunted to other teams and departments, I made it known that I'd rather quit than suffer that fate, and my American coworker, perhaps even more stressed out than I was, heard the news that he was going to have to start teaching again and decided to just walk. My boss made some noises about how M should sit tight and wait the situation out given how mercurial our CEO is, but M walked, anyway. In the end, the boss's intuition proved correct, and our team survived the crisis, minus M.

I've talked about M before, about how my Korean coworker couldn't stand him, about how M used to talk way too much while we were working, about his utter lack of nunchi (roughly: the ability to read people and social situations), about how my Korean coworker said he would leave if M were brought back on to the team. On the positive side, M was fluent in German, and his reminiscences of living in Europe sometimes made me homesick for France and Switzerland. He was also good at producing book material, and while he occasionally made silly mistakes that I had to catch when proofreading, the overall quality of his product was good. He also had a friendly demeanor, and he was a fan of my cooking despite being married to a trained chef. I also admired how ferociously dedicated he was to biking and running: he was an athlete for sure, which is one reason why I never offered to try riding with him: he'd smoke me, and if we went out biking, I'm sure I wouldn't see him until the day's end.

It's been around a year and a half since M walked, and he still hasn't found work. (How is that possible for a white boy with his level of education?) I know this because, about every week or two, he calls me, usually Sunday evening but occasionally on a different day, to talk my ear off for a half hour before finally losing steam and hanging up. It's impossible to have conversations with M because he doesn't believe in them. There will sometimes be gaps in his lectures and discourses that allow me to slip in a sentence or two, but mostly, I just listen and utter the occasional "uh-huh" or "oh, really" or "that's nice" or "hadn't thought about that." I guess the positive side of listening to M is that it requires little to no mental effort.

Anyway, M's situation has gone from bad to worse, as I've discovered through this long series of talks with him (if "talk" is the right word) over the past eighteen months. He started off having plenty of money saved up, and he said he was using his money to pay costs like rent, food, etc. while he cast about for a new job. In the beginning, he was fairly haughty and choosy about what sort of work he would accept, and he had a lot of deal-breakers: no teaching, especially kids; no work below X amount of income; no weekends—you get the idea. And in screening out the possibilities this way, M was winnowing the potential opportunities down to a very narrow band of work. He also spent his time acquiring IT certifications via online courses and at this point, he's got a pretty impressive lineup of licenses. The problem is that he's a foreigner who doesn't speak much Korean living inside a Korean market. The language barrier is keeping him from finding IT-related work.

Eventually, I began to hear that money had gotten tight for M, and I wondered aloud why he didn't put his property in Colorado on the market. He has a house and some land out there, and there are renters (I think) who are providing him with a trickle of passive income. M also says the housing market is very bad (which I think is true from what I've heard), so selling right now might not be the best move. A shame, because my thought was that M could sell his property and net a big chunk of change, which would reset the clock for him, allowing him extra time to keep searching for a job while still being able to provide for his family. But M keeps cutting himself off from solutions that might prove helpful. Every once in a while, he'd make noises about rejoining our team, at which point I'd have to firmly tell him that that was never happening. (This is primarily because it would mean losing my Korean coworker, who is our graphic designer, but it's also because the company's budget has constricted, making it impossible to hire anyone as a new team member.)

I've vented to my boss about M's predicament, and he hasn't been too sympathetic. "I told him to hang on a bit, but he left instead," the boss has said in the past. The boss also has a theory that, because M is one of the youngest in a family of some sixteen(!) kids, he's got baby-of-the-family syndrome, and he's passively expecting someone to just swoop down and help him since he lacks the initiative or gumption or whatever to help himself and his family. My own sense is that M isn't doing nearly enough to help himself out of his situation, and I have to stifle my own urge to be a big brother to him and lead him by the nose through the process of finding new work. This is something M needs to do on his own, and he needs to find both a sense of urgency about his situation as well as a sense of self-respect.

The self-respect thing is even more important now that I've heard the latest update: M, his wife, and their daughter have moved in with his mother-in-law. They could no longer afford their apartment. The poor mother-in-law was already taking care of M & Co. financially, and now she's taken the family in during her twilight years when most older Koreans expect to reap the benefits of being old in Korean society. I'm sure she's doing this more for the sake of her long-suffering daughter than for M's sake. I can't imagine that she views M very highly; I know I wouldn't. I mean, I feel for M since I've been in a sorry financial state myself, and I know what it's like to debate over whether to take a cab or get a meal and walk home. The difference is that I did eventually dig myself out of that hole, and part of that was through getting progressively better-paying work.

I understand that, stereotypically at least, husbands often don't get along with their mothers-in-law, but my feeling is that M ought to be on his knees in thanks for what his own mother-in-law is doing, even if it's mostly for the sake of her daughter and granddaughter. He also needs to sit down with his mother-in-law and figure out how much he owes her. I don't know whether she's the type to be insulted by the idea of recompense, but for me, as a person with a conscience, I'd want to make reparations as soon as possible so as to restore both her respect and my own self-respect. Being forced to shack up with your mother-in-law might or might not be a big deal in Korean culture, but from an American perspective, it's got to be one of the baser humiliations. What astounds me is that M really doesn't seem to feel this way himself. He seems quite happy to accept his mother-in-law's help, and at a guess, her help is only going to make him lazier about finding work. In his position, I'd be a madman, desperately doing everything I possibly could to recover my place as the head of the house, the primary breadwinner, and the family provider. Call me old-school.

I was glad that M had called me this evening, though: I'd been meaning to tell him something, and I did. I said to M, "Don't call me again until you've found work. I don't want to hear anything more until you've got good news, even if the good news is that you've got a shitty job." I'm hoping this will light a fire under his ass and get him combing the job ads way more assiduously than he's obviously been doing, but truth be told, I think what's actually going to happen is that I won't hear from M for a very, very long time. I'd like to have faith that M will snap out of it, feel a pang of conscience, feel some guilt, and feel some obligation to his wife and child to be the hero of his personal narrative, but I don't think M really understands that kind of pride. He once told me his wife has been a saint through all this; I know someone who was once between jobs, and his wife got on his case because she understood that he needed to step up and provide for the family—which is how I'd expect a normal person to react to such a situation, not with saintly beneficence. This person eventually sorted himself out, but until he found work, it was a stressful time, to the point where the stress was ruining his skin. That was years and years ago, but I think he learned a valuable lesson from that experience. Never again. M, by contrast, may lack the nunchi to even understand the gravity of his situation. From where I stand, it's like watching the slow, ponderous collapse of a tall building. And I think things are going to get worse before they get better.

So I won't be hearing from M for a while. The psychological trick I was going for, when I told M that I didn't want to hear from him until he found work, was that his desire to talk my ear off would become so intense that he'd have to find work just to be able to call me again. But does M actually think that way? I guess we're going to find out.

I don't think M is a bad person. He means well, but he's obviously lacking in maturity (and yet he's in his late 30s, for God's sakes!), and he lacks the sense to understand when the cosmos is trying to teach him a lesson. It's classic Dunning-Kruger: you think everything's going great while everything's going wrong thanks to you. I hope he pulls out of his nosedive. Meanwhile, I'll watch with morbid fascination to see whether he's jobless for two years... three years... maybe jobless and eventually divorced?