in Korea, no good deed goes unpunished

Last year, in July, our building announced there would be temporary outages or blackouts so that crews could dig around and strip out old electrical wiring and equipment. When the blackout/outage announcement first appeared, I saw that it used a ton of Korean vocabulary I didn't know, so I translated it for myself, word for word. I should've kept the damn translation because—guess what—the outages are happening again this month! What fun! I guess the crews didn't strip out everything last year. Is this to be a yearly thing? Who knows?

Anyway, when I saw the same announcement plastered by the elevator doors this month, I decided to go from floor to floor to check whether the announcements had indeed been placed everywhere, on every floor. They had. So I took it upon myself to throw together a so-so English translation of the sign. I printed out a bunch of copies of my translation, then spent twenty or thirty sweaty minutes going from the 26th floor to the 5th floor (the last residential floor before the gym, the building's admin office, some shops and salons, and the lobby area), cellophane-taping up my English translation next to the Korean sign.

Wednesday evening, I noticed that some cunt-faced fuckhead had taken all of my English translations down. I checked on several floors to be sure I wasn't hallucinating, and from the 14th to the 11th floor, all the English signs were gone. At first I was furious, but then, as I cooled down, I came to terms with the brute fact of some people's stupidity. As they say, you can't fix stupid. I can't even begin to imagine what had offended the sign removers: my signs were there to help the Korean-illiterate foreigners in our building, of which there are many since this apartment is one of several dumping-grounds for expats who work at my company. It's constantly annoying to me that Korean signs go up without any English translations. I know I'm usually the hardass telling expats they need to learn Korean instead of blundering about in a fog of linguistic ignorance, but I can't realistically expect all of my fellow employees to snap their fingers and instantly be able to read Korean. I also wanted to save my fellow foreigners the unpleasant surprise of a seemingly sudden, out-of-the-blue power outage. I guess the Korean administration of my building thinks differently: the foreigners shouldn't know what's going on, and besides, it's more fun when they're running around squawking incomprehensibly in their barbarian tongue.

You know what? I bet I know what the real problem is: it's something even stupider than the above imagined scenario. My signs got ripped down because they didn't have the building-admin stamp on them. They hadn't been approved, you see, and non-approved signs enrage the Bureaucracy Beast. Yeah... I bet that's what the real issue is from the admin's point of view. Maybe I'll try again by going directly to the admin office and getting my fucking signs stamped. I have 25 more copies sitting in my apartment.