Money? Naw, We Do This For The Children...

I gotta tell ya, I don't feel like blogging today.

It's been one helluva week for it only being Wednesday. After the health insurance issues, Jen and I became a little suspicious, and decided to double check our pensions. The way it works is the Korean government takes about $100 out of our checks each month for what is basically Social Security. Our boss has to match it. Once we've got a plane ticket, the Korean government gives it all back to us. It'll end up being about $2,000 a piece, after it's all said and done. So, after several phone calls we were right again. They stopped paying into the pensions as well. Here was my favorite part:

Jessica, one of our coworkers, was the first to talk to our Korean supervisor (Sunny) about this. Sunny calls the main office, and comes back and tells us that what she was told was that this was a simple typo- Jessica's name was down as "Jessie", and so the money didn't get where it was suppose to.

I gotta pause a minute and share a little bit about growing up in the Sterling Household. With kids like my brother and I things like breaking, slacking, wandering off, and losing tempers were just a normal part of the day. And when you made a mistake, there was a good chance sitting down was going to be less comfortable for a while. But when it was over, it was over.

I share that because while that could suck, it was tolerable. You just sucked it up, and moved on. What was NOT kosher was lying. Lying put you in a whole different kind of trouble. Like minimum security rich people jail to maximum "Don't Ask What He Did" jail.

So I'll tolerate the screw ups. I'll stay pleasant, as long as it's fixed in a timely way. But then they lied about it. And they didn't just lie to us, they lied to their own staff. Maybe Sunny knew it was a lie, and maybe she didn't. But it seems pretty obvious that since the Koreans use a different ALPHABET that they'd probably just use the Alien ID number like every other agency in Korea.

I mean, they didn't even come up with a good lie. They didn't even try. Really? Really, PLUS? Is that the best you could do? I mean, I know the language barrier makes it a little trickier, but come on. At least put in a little effort.

It went downhill from there. Jessica walked out of work and refused to teach. Her boyfriend almost put Sunny in tears, and we didn't see much of her after that.

Us? We're fine. I'm heading down to the Pension Office to become an expert on how the system works here in Korea. Then I'm going to make them give all of it back. PLUS keeps taking money from us, they just never put it where it should go. There's also an Office for Foreign Workers that will end up hearing from me soon if things don't improve. My gut is telling me that going there is kind of like dropping the word "lawyer". Ya don't toss it about if you aren't ready to go to the wall, and we're not there yet. I've put a few other more complicated and less interesting things in motion as well, but the end result is the same- can't nobody take my pride. Can't nobody hold me down. Oh no. Yeah, you guessed it. I gots ta keep on movin.

The whole thing has left me drained and frustrated, though. I got my little self back to the hospital today to get my refund, and make certain we now had health insurance, and it turns out today was a big anniversary for the Seoul International Healthcare Hospital Thing-Place, and so no one was there. Of course. Why wouldn't that happen?

On a related note, I put my "Bad Day" playlist back together. Gotta love Billy Joel. And Queen.

UPDATE: It's now Thursday night, and things have smoothed out. I want to get this one up, so I'll save the details for later....

-Al