1 out of 3

I had to call my HR department, a few days ago, about three problems I'd been having: (1) an apparent leak, from the above apartment, onto the ceiling close to the front door of my place; (2) a similar leak, but located in the ceiling of my place's bathroom; (3) a standard toilet leak. None of this was an emergency; the leaks were all slow. Anyway, HR cheerfully emailed that they would contact my building's repairpeople, then get back to me with a date and time for their arrival, no problem.

In typical nonlinear Korean fashion, no one got back to me, and this morning around 10:30, while I was still asleep, people started knocking and banging on my door. My brain didn't register the meaning of this at first, and by the time I was semi-coherent, the door-bangers had already used my own pass code (which I had passed along to HR at HR's request) to key their way in to my apartment. So there I was in my underwear as two guys barged in. They immediately saw the situation and backed out, giving me time to put on one of my tent-sized shirts (pants came on a few minutes later once I'd realized I needed them).

For the most part, the repair guys' ministrations involved examining my ceiling's crawlspace and relaying to me what they'd discovered. They checked the ceiling leak by my door and saw no leakage at all, despite the fact that that ceiling panel had a big, still-wet spot on it. The mystery of that wet spot apparently didn't intrigue them; they simply declared that there was no leak, so there was nothing to do. They then moved to check the ceiling leak in my bathroom, and jackpot: when one guy popped the plastic ceiling panel, a ton of dirty water came pouring out and onto my bathroom's floor. They found a pipe joining that was looser than it was supposed to be, tightened it up, and reclosed the ceiling panel. As for the toilet leak: well, the toilet had stopped leaking two days ago, so the tile next to the toilet was now dry. I showed the repair guys the photos I had taken of the leak a couple of days ago, but they simply said to call them if the toilet should start leaking again. Okay, I guess...

The guys left, and I had to clean up the dirty mess in my bathroom from all the collected water that had run out and onto my bathroom floor. Not a huge tragedy: Korean bathrooms are fairly self-contained, so cleanup was mostly a matter of using my bathroom's shower head (which is attached to a flexible hose) to clean most of the mess up. Solid bits of matter were collected and either thrown into the toilet or—for the larger chunks—scooped up with paper towels and chucked into one of my garbage cans.

Upshot: one of three problems got definitively resolved. The other two problems received a shrug, and I now have to wait for my toilet to leak again. The repair guys did advise me to just call them directly next time—something I used to do whenever I had a problem, but my HR office, when they found out I'd been doing that, told me that I was supposed to call HR first, and they would call my building's repairpeople. I never understood the need for an extra link in the communication chain, but I said "Whatever" and contacted HR from then on. Now, it seems, I'll be back to calling the repairpeople directly.

One of the loveliest aspects of living in Korea is watching how different parties can never get their story straight regarding procedure. And the other lovely thing is, of course, breakdowns in communication that lead to repairpeople visiting me and barging in while I'm still asleep, under my blanket and in my undies.