work-related cynicism

A May Day post about work! How apropos... if you're a socialist or communist, anyway.

I think my team leader is an idealist. He had just come back from a meeting, and he was telling us about certain "course corrections" that our dizzy department head* quite suddenly wanted to implement. Among those changes: an entire set of grammar exercises that I had worked on for weeks would not be used. I shrugged at this news and told my team leader that I didn't care: as long as I was given work and received regular pay, I was fine with whatever. I said to him, as I've said in the past, that I take no ownership of anything I do for our company because I know how hagweons operate: their leadership almost always tends to be both detached from reality and prone to mentally zigzagging. The result is that one may start at Point A, but it's never guaranteed that one will ever reach Point B. This isn't true only for hagweons, of course: plenty of Korean companies suffer from this same dysfunction. The Law of the Septic Tank (the biggest pieces rise to the top) is definitely in force: idiot bosses declare, "I have an idea!" and no one has the courage to tell the bosses how lame their ideas are, and no one does any sort of proof-of-concept to see whether the bosses' ideas have wings. (The ideas usually end up being stolen and/or retreads, anyway.)

My team leader declared my detached cynicism "unhealthy," but I countered that it would only be "unhealthy for the company," but not really because the company doesn't actually care. I clarified that, when I said I didn't "take ownership" of my work for the company, I was acknowledging that what we do here—creating English-language teaching materials—is largely collaborative, so there's no point in trying to act as if a given piece of work is mine alone. Even with the grammar-vocab book series I did while under a different boss, only 70-80% of each chapter was written by me, and the parts of the chapter that were arguably the most important were written by a freelancer friend of my old boss. So for years, my attitude has basically been "Fuck it—pay me" because there's no guarantee that any of our R&D department's projects, proposals, or other sundry ideas will ever be taken seriously or allowed to proceed linearly to a proper conclusion. Part of the problem is a certain Korean conservatism when it comes to innovation: no one wants to take risks, and as one coworker pointed out about my own company, the Golden Goose, our firm is the type to wait until some other hagweon takes a risk and succeeds. Only then will we follow suit, all while claiming to be innovators.

I'm beginning to think my team leader (who is American) cares a little too much about what we do at this job. I told him his idealism would cause him stress. I think of Spock telling Dr. McCoy in "Star Trek II" that McCoy must "learn to govern your passions. They will be your undoing." This company feeds vampirically on people's idealism, then does nothing with that idealism, especially when it comes to creative ideas put forth by foreigners. That's a perennial complaint of my previous boss: he, too, had been brimming with ideas, but he got rejected at every turn. To add insult to injury, my old boss would hear tell of some other employee—Korean, not foreign—proposing the boss's idea as if it were his own, and having the idea accepted simply because it came from a Korean this time. Were I younger, I might be bitter about the fundamental uselessness of my current existence, but for now, I keep my shoulder to the wheel, crank out whatever the higher-ups tell me to crank out, and await my monthly payday. Any creative aspirations I might have lie in my book projects, in things well outside the ambit of work. This isn't my dream job, but it pays the bills, and for that, at least, I'm thankful. Otherwise, it doesn't pay to be idealistic in Korea.

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*She's well-intended, our department head, but she's also pretty ditzy. She once told our team leader, around 3 p.m., that she needed to meet with him before he left for the day. The team leader usually leaves around 6 p.m. That time rolled around... no department head. 7 p.m. came and went, then 8 p.m., and the team leader waited. Finally, the department head—whom I've named Pooh Bear in other posts—popped into our office, saw our team leader, and said, "What? You're still here? Go home!" My team leader had tried calling and texting our department head several times while he waited, precisely to ask whether they were having a meeting at all. No response. Of course. Keep in mind, too, that my team leader is married and has two kids. This sort of behavior isn't unique to Pooh Bear; many Korean bosses treat their employees this way, i.e., with a sort of well-intended negligence that's actually harmful.