the rest is silence

I've heard nothing at all from Dongguk University, which I take to mean failure. We had been told that we would hear something by today. It was vague as to whether this meant we would hear something only if we had succeeded, or if we had succeeded or not. I have little reason to assume that the university would be so neglectful as to fail to inform us if we had succeeded, so I can only assume that I'm not one of the lucky two to get a position. Silence is my answer.

And so we soldier on.

ADDENDUM: The feeling I have is similar to that of being stood up on a date. I went to visit some relatives and spent the day waiting for that phone call... and waiting... and waiting. Nothing. Not a peep. 5 o'clock came and went—close of business—and still no word. Maybe they're having an intense debate about whom to hire, I speculated hopefully, but my inner realist called bullshit on that. They would have had their debate yesterday, after having interviewed all eight of us. No: more likely, this was a typical, Korean-style, let-him-down-easy maneuver. In cases where a person is likely to be upset or disappointed, Koreans who know each other only formally will prefer to avoid conflict altogether. (Koreans are fine with conflict when it's with someone they know well and are comfortable with.)

The only reason I have to hold out any hope is this: the job ad specifically says, in broken English: "We will inform you whether or not you have being [sic] successful on July 24th, 2014." (Emphasis added.) So in principle, I should have gotten a call, one way or the other. In any case, I tried to shake things up by sending an email to my Dongguk contact, the nice lady I'd referred to in an earlier post. I sent the email at 5:08PM, so it was slightly after hours; she might not see it until tomorrow. Tomorrow, while I'm working at KMA, I expect to receive either a call or an email saying definitively that I haven't been hired. That's my feeling now. My ajumma, whom I'd visited earlier today, messaged me to say that I should wait a bit longer before drawing conclusions; a colleague just said the same via email. It could be that, if I didn't receive a call, neither did anyone else. My inner realist thinks that's a long shot, but philosophically speaking, it's not beyond the realm of possibility. So again, we'll see.


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