Taecheon ran almost entirely on orders and obedience. Forget understanding that I disliked soju. The very idea that an individual could have preferences was treated as an attack on the company. All I'd said was that I liked beer and asked whether I could order some. Drink what you're given. Officer Eun, you have a lot of complaints, don't you? Will you act like this with customers? What did customers have to do with beer? Would sales vanish if I skipped the soju? Was a junior employee drinking beer really so offensive?
Staff dinners consisted of managers and above, alcoholics who only hid it during working hours, drinking at least three bottles of soju each and making spectacles of themselves. Two managers, two senior managers, the deputy, and the branch manager: six people committing every drunken outrage imaginable. Then they worked the next day still drunk. That generated piles of reversal slips for their botched transactions. An extra zero on a loan or a misdirected transfer was an everyday occurrence.
Watching drunken bankers advise customers, I could only sigh at the state of the branch. How could people out of their minds give proper guidance? Quoting the wrong interest rate barely counted as a mistake. Their work was almost uniformly a mess, with the occasional flash of normality. If I hadn't worked at another branch, I'd have thought this was average banking. Cleaning up after Goldlight tripped over its own feet or misprinted a passbook would have been far better.
The officers visibly hated drinking. The managers would openly pressure us. Don't you understand working life? Staff dinners are an extension of work. Don't want a job? Then they'd complain about how difficult the younger generation was. Bu disliked getting drunk, and they routinely painted her as oversensitive, humorless, openly disobedient, contemptuous of company rules, and strange for picking apart every word they said. All while a poster explicitly forbidding forced attendance at staff dinners hung in the branch. What branch still does this these days?
Once, I merely wet my lips with soju before setting the glass back down. The smell had probably been especially sickening. Somehow, Kim Jong-do saw it from a distant seat, despite having eyes smaller than fingernails. He immediately pointed it out.
“Officer Eun, are you lifting weights with that glass? Up and down, up and down.”
I forced I don't want to drink back down my throat and smiled.
“I was trying to make it last. Apparently, there's no need.”
Then I downed it to give him nothing else to seize on. The rookies were left with no choice but to drink. We officers dodged and invented excuses however we could, but none worked on supervisors who'd survived longer at the bank. They'd spent years wearing down other employees' minds, or had already damaged their own enough with alcohol.
My stomach's upset.
Soju will disinfect it.
I'm taking herbal medicine.
So am I. It's even better for you with alcohol.
I've never drunk much.
Then you can learn now.
I don't really feel like drinking today.
Don't want to drink with your coworkers? Bet you drink just fine with friends. Don't like staff dinners? Want to go home for good?
I witnessed these exchanges right in front of me. Thankfully, I wasn't their target. Half involved Bu, the other half Ji. With a year and a half more experience of working life, I simply shut up and drank. I chose to let it turn into diarrhea or vomit afterward.
Employees had two choices at these coercive gatherings. Attend reluctantly and be forced to drink, or refuse to attend at all. Most drank under pressure, swearing inwardly. I'd hidden my real limit, but Bu had told the manager hers honestly. She really did get drunk beyond a bottle of soju, and even one glass made her flush. Hwang was her chief tormentor, continually forcing more on her. When she drank, she spoke honestly. She wasn't in her right mind.
Hwang Jae-ik loved questioning her in that state. “How many men have you dated? How far have you gone?” Things like that. Listening beside her, I'd answer as though he'd asked me an absurd question.
“I've never dated a man, and the farthest I've been is Jeju. I haven't been overseas yet. I'd like to climb Mount Baekdu on holiday, though.”
You absolute garbage bastard. You want to do this to a twenty-four-year-old who hasn't even received her university diploma? Hwang turned his irritation on me.
“I wasn't asking you, Officer Eun.”
“I thought you were. That hurts, Manager Hwang.”
I'd quickly fill his empty glass and loudly call, Have a drink! As I raised mine, the drunken, flushed Bu hastily lifted hers. Song, who'd been watching as though it were a cheap play and occasionally sniggering, would obligingly raise his too. Irritated, Hwang clinked against our three glasses and swallowed his drink.
I'd rather not say much about how employees who skipped the dinners were treated. In short, they were working furniture. Bae Seo-yeon was Taecheon's living ATM, an android superior to Goldlight. She was valued as a machine, but not treated as human.
The moment she'd been assigned here, she'd told Ma, [I can't drink, so I won't attend staff dinners]. I learned that from Hwang. He'd been bad-mouthing her behind her back as a warning that behaving like her made you a target. All I could think was how brave she was.
Brave people were rare in banking. The men, especially, might as well have been castrated alive. They were practically yes-men to everything a superior said or did. I envied Bae's courage. I can't drink, so I won't attend staff dinners. The courage to say that sentence properly and take responsibility for what followed. In exchange for falling out of the manager's favor, she'd been excluded from every dinner since. But she received more abuse over sales than anyone else and was constantly hounded for supposedly doing her job badly. She was also the one who arrived earliest to open up.
After Bae, the person treated least like a human being was Lee Tae-bong.
Lee had no interest in sales. On arrival, he'd greeted the manager with [I have no interest in sales targets. Please expect nothing from me]. How did that sound to a manager obsessed with performance because he wanted to become the next regional head? Apparently, thunderous roars had erupted from the office. Documents had been thrown, and the names of every kind of animal's offspring hurled at Lee.
I suspected Lee wasn't excluded from dinners like Bae because the branch needed someone besides Gu Ji-hye to handle corporate loans. The manager also needed an example he could openly torment to frighten everyone else. With two or three years left until retirement, Lee wasn't going to resign no matter what happened. He'd poured his entire fortune into Hyeopseo Pharmaceuticals shares. Even the loan he'd taken against his home had gone into them. His bank salary went entirely toward loan interest or more shares. At lunch, he repeatedly urged me to buy Hyeopseo too. It was certain to reach 15,000 won, he said, and was currently at 5,000. Buying now was guaranteed profit. When I said I didn't invest in stocks and only used deposits and savings plans, he insisted only idiots wasted their lives that way. Stocks were how you made money. Buy some now.
I asked how his family lived if his entire salary went into shares. His wife was a civil servant, apparently, and three family members lived on her pay. He even begrudged spending 10,000 won on his own lunch. That would buy two Hyeopseo shares. He'd tried cryptocurrency too, but after a disastrous loss had stopped and stuck to stocks. Ma could probably cut off a few of his fingers and he still wouldn't quit. Perhaps that was why the manager treated him so recklessly.
Abuse rained down on Lee often. It was the first time I'd heard things like You fXcking bastard in a bank from an employee rather than a customer. The curses came with accusations that he hadn't met his credit card target. Why was he still alive, a banker that age who couldn't even bring in sales? He heard it over and over. Bu, hearing a grown man roar like that for the first time, trembled as she prepared for the morning.
Only Kim Jong-do chuckled at Ma's shouting, saying that if Lee had met his targets, there wouldn't be a problem. After Lee emerged, Gu Ji-hye was called in. The staff waited in fear for their own names. Gu at least brought in enough to cover herself. She must have sacrificed countless sales to the branch on her way up to senior manager. I didn't know where she could find more, but somehow she did.
Sometimes indirectly, sometimes quite openly, Ma warned us to behave if we didn't want to end up like Bae or Lee. We were told everyone had high hopes for the new arrivals, and that if we just worked hard, the manager would appreciate us. I didn't believe it at all. There was no knowing when we'd be treated that way ourselves.