After my first week of being thrown into a room with a bunch of children without training, my boss decided that me and my co-worker Dallas deserved an official welcoming party. This party consisted of Dallas, my boss, my co-workers and myself going to a singing room and getting fairly drunk while singing songs. Fair enough, it went on good for awhile until the boss decided to shoo away the woman folk and told me and Dallas that a special surprise was coming. A few minutes later, half a dozen women came into the room and proceeded to line up facing us. They all looked extremely uncomfortable and talked amongst themselves while adjusting their tight fitting colorful sparkly dresses.
My boss told me and Dallas to choose; so we did. Girls of our choosing came over to me and Dallas and proceeded to go to work. Eventually however, my boss told us that they didn't want to deal with foreigners so me and Dallas had to leave. After twenty minutes of waiting outside, we got bored and went off to a local bar we knew and had a few drinks. Happy first week!
The longer I was at the school the worse things got. Everyone could tell that the school was strapped for cash and it was getting difficult for the boss to hide it. One morning, the boss called me and Dallas into his office and sat us down. He politely asked me and Dallas to let him borrow half of our paychecks this month and that he would give us the money back next week with an extra 100,000 won included (roughly 90 bucks US).
Being the idiot that I was, I thought it was a good deal so I said it was totally fine. Dallas even agreed to it as well, but he was much more suspicious. After the third month in a row of borrowing money from me, I became outright angry and disgusted with myself for agreeing to such a proposal. I went down to the office everyday and asked about the money. Everyday, they told me it would all come the following week.
I started to get mad. I demanded my money from my boss. Shouting matches begun to happen everyday. It got so bad that at one point my boss just stopped coming to work. He changed his phone, stopped responding to his emails and essentially disappeared.
I was frantic. I went down to the head office and pounded on the big glass door to no avail. Luckily I was able to break into my boss's old office and found me and Dallas's college diplomas. This enabled us to be able to find a new job if we wanted. Dallas wanted to just ignore the money issue and move on, but I was out close to 1500 dollars and was going to either bring the school down or get my money.
I looked through my contract, which was very poorly written, and noticed that they made no mention of attire that should be worn at work. Everyone had always just worn semi-formal clothes, but now that I found out I didn't have to I said the hell with it. However, I took it a step further....
For the next two weeks I wore the same dirty white t-shirt, dirty pair of cargo shorts and some cheap flip-flips to work. I also did not shower and shave and I walked into class everyday and asked my students "What would you like to do today?"
Whatever they said, as long as it didn't hurt anyone of course, I allowed. It eventually got to the point where the kids were so offended by my presence in class that they refused to come so of course the parents called the school constantly trying to figure out what was going on. The administration tried to ignore it, but students were dropping rapidly and they were hemorrhaging even more money due to my behavior.
Finally, the sons of bitches actually invited me to come down to the administration office. With a smirk on my face and holding a copy of the contract, I casually walked down to their office 15 minutes late while eating a bag of chips. I walked in, didn't say anything and just sat down in the chair furthest from their desk and said "what's up?"
The man behind the desk stood up and asked me why I was embarrassing myself. I pleaded ignorance and told him that there was nothing in my contract about personal appearance. After a few heated exchanges, the man behind the desk became livid and started coming toward me. He swung a punch at me which I moved away from and then pushed him away from me. At this point, another person came out from a side room and jumped in front of us.
The first man ran out of the room and the other man beckoned me to come into side room he came out of. I quickly realized that I had finally met the true head of this collapsing organization. We sat down and he asked what I wanted. I told him that I want the money that was owed to me or I would continue to drive students away. He threatened to simply fire me, but I retorted that I would gladly take this to court and was willing to stay in the country as long as it took. I was hoping he would not see through my bluff. He finally agreed to give me my back pay if I wrote some formal letters of apology to the student's parents that had left. I said I would do that, but I wanted to come to the bank with him so I could make sure the money was transferred. He seemed insulted by this, but I really didn't care.
When we got back to the school I handed him a piece of paper with my two weeks notice on it. He looked at it and an image of disbelief entered his face. He said that I couldn't do that and that he would break my visa and not allow me to transfer it to another job. I simply said you are welcome to try, but that what he had been doing is illegal so I didn't need an official letter to transfer my work visa. I said that I would finish my work here and then move on. He asked me where I was going to transfer to but I just ignored him and walked back to class.
I never got my last paycheck from that company but I found out later that the incident between me and the management of the company led to an investigation that eventually caused the school to get shut down.
When all else fails, just don't shower!
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