RANTING/VENTING MEGATHREAD 3.0

Why do all the PA systems in every school I've taught at have to be cranked up to 11!
8:45AM, quietly listening to the birds outside and preparing for a free 1st period as the students are practicing for tomorrow's Sports day. An otherwise peaceful morning is interrupted by the obnoxious speaker "pffft! pffft! 아! 아! 아! 아! 아! 아! 아! 아! pffft! pffft! 아! 아! 아! 아! 아! 아! 아! 아!" blaring at insane volumes. Yes, it's important that every speaker in the school blares the VP screaming instructions to the students, on the field.

Latest K-MIL rant. She always annoys me on the discussion about food. Yesterday, I didn't want to eat the baby octopus in a restaurant and suddenly "He doesn't like seafood" she says to everyone at the table. I do love eating fish (Cod, Mackerel, Salmon) and can eat crab and lobster (though not part of my diet).

Latest K-MIL rant. She always annoys me on the discussion about food. Yesterday, I didn't want to eat the baby octopus in a restaurant and suddenly "He doesn't like seafood" she says to everyone at the table. I do love eating fish (Cod, Mackerel, Salmon) and can eat crab and lobster (though not part of my diet).

Did you bother correcting the table and explaining that you do like most fish-type seafood, but just don't like octopus? Or did you just feel annoyed about it and keep it to yourself?

I just don't get the incessant need to be friends with the foreign teacher. If it looks like I'm busy, sleeping or just doing literally anything else, why force a conversation? Why do you need to know everything? Does it even look/sound like I want to be a part of the conversation when we start talking???

Especially today with a substitute who's only going to be here for like two days.

I get it. Culture of having to know all the details, but some days I would just like to have my conversations limited only to my students and CT in class time. Too tired for this *sigh*

I mean I have the opposite problem in my latest school. I'm literally a ghost. NO ONE makes any effort to talk to me. If I make a conversation I get an answer but that's it. They aren't busy, they sit and INCESSANTLY chat to each other all day. They're all English teachers in my office but I get nothing. Usually on a Monday I will ask how their weekends were...one will say "Good, thanks" then turn to the other teacher and tell her all about her weekend in Korean LOL...like it was my question but sure.

I feel bad for my new main CoT he's not really aware that I have the plague and that no one includes me. One day he happily informs me that we're going to a restaurant for lunch, only to have one of the others rush out on her phone suddenly. He awkwardly tells me that she didn't make a reservation for me so quickly had to go do it.

Latest K-MIL rant. She always annoys me on the discussion about food. Yesterday, I didn't want to eat the baby octopus in a restaurant and suddenly "He doesn't like seafood" she says to everyone at the table. I do love eating fish (Cod, Mackerel, Salmon) and can eat crab and lobster (though not part of my diet).

Did you bother correcting the table and explaining that you do like most fish-type seafood, but just don't like octopus? Or did you just feel annoyed about it and keep it to yourself?

It was brought up in conversation before. They knew I don't care to eat any dish with baby octopus prior to going to this restaurant but a dish containing them was ordered anyway. I stated that I like a lot of fish food but of course, it goes on deaf ears.

I get ignored, but not left out. Two of my coTs are very good about sitting with me so that I'm not sitting in total silence during dinners, though.

@Savant: Do you think your MIL is that dense (I say this because it's pretty dense to assume someone hates all seafood just because they state they don't like one thing) and forgetful, or do you think it's a case of passive-aggressive needling to try to get you to not be "picky" about your food? Or is it possible that she was just using it as an excuse for the rest of the table so that they don't bother you with your own food choices?

I get ignored, but not left out. Two of my coTs are very good about sitting with me so that I'm not sitting in total silence during dinners, though.

@Savant: Do you think your MIL is that dense (I say this because it's pretty dense to assume someone hates all seafood just because they state they don't like one thing) and forgetful, or do you think it's a case of passive-aggressive needling to try to get you to not be "picky" about your food? Or is it possible that she was just using it as an excuse for the rest of the table so that they don't bother you with your own food choices?

She's just one of those Koreans who assumes every Korean dish is delicious and for someone to not want to eat one such dish means that you don't like all Korean food. So yeah, maybe, dense.

It's why I find eating any food with her in the same room/restaurant such a tedious task.

She's just one of those Koreans who assumes every Korean dish is delicious and for someone to not want to eat one such dish means that you don't like all Korean food. So yeah, maybe, dense.

Are you saying she's an idiot, Savant?

I hear stories like this and am glad that my partner's parents aren't difficult.

I hear stories like this and am glad that my partner's parents aren't difficult.

Right? My GF has a kid and it seems to be less stress free than some of this stuff.

When you reach a certain age, you're probably going to order whatever and if your picky son-in-law doesn't like it, tough for him. He has an extra 30 years on this planet more than you. I mean if my Korean son-in-law had a problem with cheese or gravy or lamb or cilantro or pesto, there might come a point where I just said "Eff it, I'm going to order whatever I damn well please. He can eat it or not. I didn't come out to a restaurant to eat spaghetti marinara for the 20th time in a row." So I get the ordering something else. There could well be more cases of something beyond just cilantro/baby octopus. The negatives can stand out over the many times there's no problem.

On the other hand, if she chose a baby octopus restaurant and that's what the primary menu item is, yeah that's a knob move on her part. I don't care for baby octopus at all and that's a hard sell. As for mentioning it to everyone, I guess it depends on how it was said on how picky you are. If it was sneering, yeah that's an asshat move in front of company. If it's ignorance, whatever. Your actions will show her to be either right or wrong and people can see. And I can definitely see that crap getting really irritating after the 80th time. 

Being proactive can help. Be the one that either suggests or declares which Korean restaurant you're going to. Don't let the baby octopus option ever happen. We're going to the jjimdalk or kamjahtang place and that's that. Another good way to beat that perception is to have a few "hardcore oldschool" places on your favorites list. The holes in the wall that have been there for 40 years that get the "How do you know this place?" reaction or certain hardcore dishes.  That usually shuts that crowd the eff up. Maybe a few belts of traditional soju, you know, the varnishy stuff.

Or just order another bottle of soj and go to the happy place in your mind of old college football highlights and scenes from Casino or some old war movie.

I am banned from r/pics forever cuz someone was talking about the Avengers in my thread and I said something that was a spoiler.

FFS

Not a good start to my day so far, I'm in such a foul mood right now.

I had another bad kakao taxi experience this morning. This time the driver's phone ended up crashing, and after rebooting he couldn't get the kakao app to work. That's fine, we can work with that. I can give him directions. Except, he refuses to listen to me. He insists on bringing up a different GPS/navigation app and using that. Fine. But then he can't seem to understand where I want to go. Apparently, he didn't look at the destination on his kakao taxi app before it crashed, and he keeps "mishearing" what I'm telling him after the fact, and asking me over and over again if I want to go to a completely different location -- despite me telling him 'no' each and every single time, he seems to think I don't know what I'm saying and that he's right and that I REALLY want to go to this other place on the complete opposite side of town. He finally gives me his phone so that I can type the destination in myself, only he doesn't let me finish typing and snatches the phone back from me while I'm only halfway done. Then he ****** wipes the whole thing out because he thinks I mistyped it since what I had typed didn't start with the characters indicating the location he kept insisting I wanted to go. Clearly, I was fumbling around too much on his phone and didn't really know how to spell things out.

Mind, this is all while we're still moving on a busy road, with the meter running, and with him going slow enough that people can walk past us, and then only stopping AT GREEN LIGHTS knowing that they are green lights. I begin to insist on making him follow my directions again, but he refuses, and he finally pulls the car over. He hands me his phone again so that I can type in the destination name, only, as he passes the phone off to me, he accidentally hits some button on the app and closes it out, and I have no idea which app it is. Before I can ask him to bring it up again, he gets out of the car and runs off to take a piss.

I got out of the car while he was doing that and flagged down another taxi.

And now one of my new coTs is being an asshole. He's like that with me, and only me, whenever he's loaded down with a lot of work. He's been showing red flags for a while, now, and his level of disrespect has been growing. Today was not a good day for him to test me, and I'm planning on having words with him, but I don't expect that to go well.

I also really ****** hate how some of my coTs will be all, "Well, we discussed and planned the semester's schedule at the beginning of the semester, didn't we?" whenever I ask if there's going to be any changes during a day or week that has certain situations that I have been conditioned to know could bring changes to the schedule... as if we have NEVER ****** changed the schedule before, as if THEY HAVE NEVER ****** changed the schedule before based on where they are with their own classes. Whenever I point that out to them, they give nervous chuckles, like they don't want to argue with me, but then they say the same shit later... unless there is an expected change.

It's so ****** stupid.

I also really ****** hate how some of my coTs will be all, "Well, we discussed and planned the semester's schedule at the beginning of the semester, didn't we?" whenever I ask if there's going to be any changes during a day or week that has certain situations that I have been conditioned to know could bring changes to the schedule... as if we have NEVER ****** changed the schedule before, as if THEY HAVE NEVER ****** changed the schedule before based on where they are with their own classes. Whenever I point that out to them, they give nervous chuckles, like they don't want to argue with me, but then they say the same shit later... unless there is an expected change.
It's so ****** stupid.

    Just sharpen up your I-*******-knew-it-grin so that next time you ask the question and there is a change, you can absolutely annihilate everybody in the office with that grin.
    I work at a handful of different schools so I always start my day with questions about schedules and nobody thinks anything of it. It's so routine that it's now basically like saying good morning. Works out well for me.

    Just sharpen up your I-*******-knew-it-grin so that next time you ask the question and there is a change, you can absolutely annihilate everybody in the office with that grin.
    I work at a handful of different schools so I always start my day with questions about schedules and nobody thinks anything of it. It's so routine that it's now basically like saying good morning. Works out well for me.

Yeah, I probably should work on that grin, I admit that I'm really bad at it. I'm a lot better at throwing daggers, but that doesn't always get the best results.

I've tried checking in daily with my schools before, but it tends to exasperate most of my coTs because they don't usually see Korean surprises from the perspective of an often not-informed foreigner. They always think that someone is going to let me know if something changes, and they don't usually understand that this doesn't happen as often as they think it does, lol. They just think I don't trust them.

Which is fair, because I don't. xD But that's their own faults.

They just think I don't trust them.
Which is fair, because I don't. xD But that's their own faults.

Doveryai, no proveryai.  

I reaaally don't like the common Korean question of "Which do you like better? Your home or here?"

It's such a trap question. Say your home, and it's an insult. Say Korea, and you're giving them that satisfaction that they want so badly.

I often just end up telling them "I dunno..." Since I truly am on the fence.

I reaaally don't like the common Korean question of "Which do you like better? Your home or here?"

It's such a trap question. Say your home, and it's an insult. Say Korea, and you're giving them that satisfaction that they want so badly.

I often just end up telling them "I dunno..." Since I truly am on the fence.

"Me? Oh, I think Japan is the best but I got a job here instead. I'm not the best teacher in the world so they sent me here."

Watch the fireworks.

I reaaally don't like common Korean question of "Which do you like better? Your home or here?"

It's such a trap question. Say your home, and it's an insult. Say Korea, and you're giving them that satisfaction that they want so badly.

I often just end up telling them "I dunno..." Since I truly am on the fence.

Oh yeah that's a really tough question.  Similar to "So, when are you going home?" or "Will you stay here in Korea?"

If you haven't already made up your mind (like me) I've found it impossible to have a conversation about the topic.  I don't know if it's the language barrier or what but I've never been given any advice from anyone.  I feel like I'm expected to either say "I'm going home in _____ or "I'm staying here forever".  No in between allowed and no chance of discussing pros and cons of staying/leaving.  So I always have to come to Waygook for that 

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