I didn't even want to breathe, let alone do anything else, but suddenly remembered the mandatory Goldlight Bank online lectures due next week. Groaning and sighing, I opened the training website on my laptop and started a video. Every five minutes, a little window popped up with a surprise question to check that I was paying attention. Fail to answer the multiple-choice question within sixty seconds, and the lecture restarted from the beginning. I was looking at my phone when a pop-up startled me into answering it and moving on.
The bank had lectures every employee was required to watch. Privacy, preventing sexual harassment, new products whenever they were released, in-depth coverage of whatever financial scam was going around. Whenever finance-related legislation changed or a new law passed, another lecture or two joined the list. If you didn't take your qualification renewal courses on time, you couldn't sell those products. There were also online training courses, of which everyone had to complete at least four or five hours every quarter. Or at least pretend to watch and leave a completion record in the system. Otherwise, you lost KPI points. If it hadn't counted toward our performance, nobody would have watched any of them.
The branch manager had shouted at the morning meeting that we had to finish our courses by the end of this week. Why did I forget about them while working so hard at the bank, only to remember every detail once I came home to rest?
Apparently the training website used to be accessible from branch computers. Naturally, employees played their lectures during working hours. Unwatched lectures ran on mute on the bank's computers, and people often passed the tests through lucky guesses that just cleared the cutoff.
Goldlight Bank had paid guest lecturers a fortune and spent a fortune building the website. When it realized its employees remained just as stupid after the lectures as before, it tried a variety of measures.
Determined to force the lectures into our brains, Goldlight Bank blocked access to the training website from branch computers altogether. Everyone from branch managers to officers had to complete the required courses. The exams became harder too, with twenty questions selected at random from a pool of a hundred. During videos, we had to click [I am watching attentively.] within five seconds, or answer a multiple-choice mini-quiz within a minute. Get it wrong, and the lecture went back to the beginning.
The busy supervisors at Taecheon had no intention of spending their precious time on mere mandatory lectures. They found an easier solution. They gave Ji Geon-u their usernames and passwords and told him to watch the lectures and pass the exams for them. With a threat: fail, and his internship evaluation would be a disaster. Even Goldlight Bank probably hadn't anticipated that.
Geon-u brought his own laptop, opened the employee training website, and logged in as Manager Hwang Jae-ik first. He watched the lecture and took the twenty-question multiple-choice exam. He said he'd tried hard. He got forty. You needed sixty to pass. Of course a twenty-three-year-old with almost no financial knowledge would get that score if you suddenly made him watch a lecture and sit an exam.
To retake the test, you had to watch the entire two-hour lecture again. The retake also went on your record. Hwang went berserk, demanding to know what Geon-u had done with his account and calling the intern a stupid bastard all day long. The story reached Branch Manager Ma Seong-geon, who didn't try to stop him. He went one better, earnestly instructing Geon-u to use his account for the very last exam.
The more I heard, the more absurd it got. Bank interns weren't hired to watch branch employees' mandatory lectures and take their exams. Neither Assistant Manager Bae nor I had even thought of handing over our accounts. Officer Kim Jin-ju, however, apparently tried to give Geon-u her training-site username and password and ask him to do hers too. Looking flustered, he told her he'd scored forty. She gave up and walked away.
Having sacrificed Hwang's account to learn the correct answers from his twelve mistakes and their explanations, Geon-u logged in as Manager Song Byeong-jun and Manager Hong Hui-gyeong, watched the videos, and took their tests. Even though the twenty questions kept changing, he cleared sixty. Using the exams from those three accounts, he compiled an answer bank, then logged in as Senior Manager Gu Ji-hye and Senior Manager Lee Tae-bong and scored over eighty. Finally, he watched the videos and took the exams on Deputy Branch Manager Kim Jong-do's and Branch Manager Ma Seong-geon's accounts, getting a hundred on each.
At that point I offered some consolation along the lines of, You've had a rough time at this madhouse, Geon-u. He only said that other branches made their interns do worse, so he could live with this. This wasn't the worst place? ......Banking never ceased to amaze me.
He told me about a few interns from his intake. At one branch, a twenty-three-year-old woman had quit after two weeks because a forty-three-year-old male senior manager openly kept asking her to be his office wife. A male intern with a car spent his days chauffeuring branch employees' children to and from kindergarten, daycare, elementary school, middle school, and all sorts of private academies instead of doing bank work. Some complained that they'd never imagined a bank internship meant driving bankers' children around. Geon-u asked if he wasn't better off than them, at least. I had no answer. It was all shit. None of it was any better.
Geon-u printed four sheets of answers from the twenty-question tests he'd taken and handed them to Assistant Manager Bae Seo-yeon and the remaining officers for free. He said it would be a waste if only Taecheon's supervisors benefited from all his hard work. With his answers in hand, I scored a hundred. At least twelve hours of his life had gone into those sheets. I tore them into sixteen pieces and put them in my briefcase. The date and time of printing, the branch name, and Ji Geon-u's name were stamped along the bottom. Throw away a sheet like that carelessly and, if you were unlucky, who knew what trouble might follow. I'd take it to the bank and shred it.
Just as I passed the exam, the washing machine played its tune. We each did our own laundry, so I hung only mine on the drying rack. When I'd first arrived, I'd wondered why there was no dryer. Did they lead lives that didn't require one? A week later, I understood. I seemed to be the only person who did laundry here. The inside of the washer looked as if it hadn't been cleaned in ages, so I hired someone to clean it. Every other man in the residence was married. They apparently collected all their laundry from Monday to Friday, then took the sour-smelling pile home on Friday evening and dumped it on their wives. Once their wives dealt with those filthy, stale clothes, they brought them all back on Monday to wear again.
Absolutely disgusting.
Was the women's residence like this too?
Apparently, long ago, there had been talk of pooling money to hire a woman to clean and cook. Hiring someone cost money. Male bankers were experts at wasting money on nonsense while refusing to spend it where it was needed. These spectacularly stingy people couldn't even agree that cleaning was necessary, and the idea soon died.
Besides, everyone went out for lunch. Dinner was almost always eaten out too: ordered into the branch, at a nearby restaurant, or at a dinner with a client company. Unless you insisted on breakfast, you never needed to eat at the residence. The idea of having breakfast or hiring someone to cook disappeared too.
At Hwapyeong, I'd at least eaten a little in the mornings. Early in my transfer to Taecheon, I bought bananas, soy milk, tomatoes, and roasted eggs to keep in the fridge for breakfast. I could have put up with people constantly stealing a piece or two of the new employee's breakfast, but they wouldn't even clean up afterward. They stole my eggs and bananas and left the shells and peels on the table. The culprits didn't clean them up even when they rotted and began to stink. In the end, I, the victim, had to wipe up the black liquid. After the fourth time, I gave up buying anything for the residence fridge.
I'd washed and was drying my hair, exchanging a quick video-call greeting with my sister, when the round-three crowd arrived at two in the morning. There was no missing them: Deputy Branch Manager Kim Jong-do started singing loudly the moment he stepped out of the elevator. After repeatedly entering the wrong door code, he began pounding on the door with his fist and calling not my name, but that of Officer Yu, who'd quit ages ago. Apparently my name hadn't been updated in the depths of his subconscious yet. He was making enough noise in the hallway to wake the whole building. The sleeping neighbors hadn't done anything to deserve this, so I ran to open the door.
Three drunken middle-aged men practically crawled inside. Only Hwang, who came in last, was remotely coherent. According to him, they'd put the company president in a taxi to send him home, and he'd immediately vomited his entire dinner over the back seat. The furious driver ordered him out. The shock had apparently sobered Hwang up halfway. He apologized, took 100,000 won from his wallet, and slipped it to the driver, asking him to take the man safely to the address they'd given. The driver reluctantly agreed.
Then the president pissed himself in the back seat. That finished sobering Hwang up completely. The driver was so angry he could practically breathe fire, demanding the man get out at once. Hwang apologized again and stuffed another 200,000 won into his pocket. After watching the taxi drive off into the distance with the driver cursing furiously, Hwang had bundled the other two into another cab and brought them home.
While I listened to this filthy tale, the deputy branch manager lay spread-eagled in the living room, singing trot songs and swimming with both arms. He still had his shoes on. I couldn't help wondering whether I should keep working at a place like this. Hwang was conscious but weaving about, so I supported him and shoved him into his room. Personally, I'd have preferred to shove him onto the balcony. He threw himself onto the bed and seemed to pass out instantly. I closed the door and went to find the others.
Senior Manager Lee lay in the entryway, asleep among the shoes, with his head on Hwang's dress shoes and my sneakers clutched to his chest. I nudged him with my foot, but he didn't move. The deputy branch manager had apparently chosen the living room floor as his bed after swimming across it. His singing cut in and out like a broken radio. Both were completely gone. A residence with rats or cockroaches would have been far better. Instead, ours was infested with drunks. I dragged each of them into his room, then went into mine and fell asleep.