When I told the Hwapyeong staff about my call with Officer Yu at Taecheon, the first thing out of everyone's pizza-filled mouths was, Who's the branch manager? At Ma Seong-geon's name, Manager Kim Ji-won even put down her cake. Biting her lip, she spent a long time studying the Taecheon staff photos in the directory. She supposedly ate three tubes of lipstick a month thanks to that habit. With a sigh, she picked her plate back up and clicked her tongue.
“Officer Eun. You're in for a rough time, aren't you?”
“I haven't even started there yet, and I'm scared, Manager Kim.”
“All the ticking time bombs in one place. Every one of them. Well. You can do it. You can do it! Officer Eun! I'm not the one being transferred! So! It's fine! Just! Fine!”
“Can't I just stay here?”
I haven't even gone to Taecheon, and I'm getting more and more anxious. Everyone transferring out handed their entire cash holdings to the head teller. My balance fell to zero won, which felt strange. Unless I was going on leave, I almost never registered a zero cash balance.
Before long, we were swamped with shredding we'd put off in the vault and work for customers due in next week. Things had to be finished or sent through the bank. I was especially overwhelmed because I'd assumed I wouldn't be transferred before my second year at Hwapyeong was up. Assistant Manager Go Mi-sul, who was in their second year here, sighed.
“You never know with personnel until the list's out. I thought I'd be transferred this time, but no. Ah. Hwapyeong again.”
“Assistant Manager Go. Want to trade?”
Knowing I'd been sent to the middle of nowhere, Go hurriedly answered my offer.
“I mean I love Hwapyeong so much I want to be buried here!”
I looked up the location of this infamous Taecheon branch. ......Now I see why Kang said it was tucked into a forgotten corner. It was at least two and a half hours by car from Hwapyeong. That's quite a way.
Personnel announcements almost always came on Friday afternoon. Wherever the transferred employee happened to be, they somehow had to report to their new branch on Monday morning. To exaggerate a little, if you were transferred from the Gangwon regional headquarters to Singapore on Friday, you had to be at work in Singapore before nine the next Monday. After joining the bank, I'd saved six months of pay and bought a compact car. It was the only thing I could count on. If the housing's truly awful, I'll sleep in the car.
As soon as I got home, I told my parents I'd been transferred and would be living in staff housing. Then I started packing a backpack and suitcase. Surprisingly, they seemed positive about the accommodation. I was the only one overflowing with worry. All the more so because the people at my current branch were extraordinarily decent.
A year and a half ago, I'd been a brand-new banker making all the mistakes a brand-new banker makes. When I made an error or caused trouble, all I could do was report it to a supervisor as quickly as possible and fix it with a great deal of advice and help. I'd always felt both sorry and grateful toward the customers I'd dealt with and the colleagues I'd worked alongside. But from Yu Seong-u's description, Taecheon sounded like a place where the other staff tied up rookies and ate them when they made a mistake.
Despite the distant posting and ominous phone call, I was a little excited to meet new people and see another branch. Hwapyeong had been my first assignment after recruit training. Taecheon would be my second, and I was curious about how other branches worked.
The messenger room for my intake was bursting with talk about the latest appointments. Few were as crushed as I was by an unexpected posting to an outlying branch. Most hadn't reached two years yet and were staying put. With nearly forty recruits all chattering, the conversation scrolled endlessly. When I mentioned my transfer, friends from the same Pyeongan regional headquarters immediately suggested meeting up. I had no idea how hygienic Yu's old bed would be, so I'd been rolling up a thin mattress pad to put over it. I stopped packing and turned toward the wardrobe.
Goldlight Bank had abolished its rigid, uniform dress code and declared freedom of dress in the name of a flexible, less hierarchical workplace. Show up in a character T-shirt or shorts, though, and you weren't treated as human. They went on about casual suits and business casual as proper employee attire. We had to find clothes somewhere between a full suit and something actually comfortable.
The men simply removed their ties and wore suits a shade less black. The bank accepted that as reasonably formal. It had also dropped the almost sadistically demanding rules about women's clothing and hair, so women who wore glasses or trousers received some small measure of human treatment, too.
I took out shirts, hangers, socks, and all four of my suits. Looking over the Goldlight Bank Credit Card Operations Guide, Goldlight Bank Banking Skills Refresher Training materials, books on household loan consultations, stretched-neck T-shirts I used as pajamas, and an old suitcase that wouldn't close, I messaged a friend.
[Where are we meeting?]
“I hear once they send you somewhere that remote, you're there for at least two and a half or three years.”
“Really?”
“Nobody else wants to go either. So they leave you there as long as possible, until you've stagnated for three years and they can't put off moving you any longer. Apparently, once you're in, it's hard to get transferred to another area. Singles especially get left to stagnate until they turn into petroleum. Married people get moved pretty easily if they yell at HR about having kids.”
The bank didn't keep someone in the same branch or department for three consecutive years. It constantly rotated people to prevent embezzlement and corruption. There were probably exceptions, but few. And even with the rotation, every kind of scandal still happened. Sipping draft beer, Officer Kim Ji-hun asked me a question.
“Got any connections in HR?”
“No.”
“Then did you do something fXcked-up?”
“I don't think so. Maybe they sent me to Taecheon because I've got nothing going for me.”
“That's what I think too. They sent a young male employee with no one behind him somewhere far away. Looked around, picked someone, and you were the unlucky one. Usually, they send new recruits or people who've just been promoted to places like that. The recruits join knowing nothing and work there without realizing what they've walked into. On the bright side, going now isn't so bad. You'll keep moving between branches as long as you work at the bank anyway. Apparently, once you've done the branch farthest from headquarters, they put you somewhere closer to home next time. And they won't send you back to the same branch. Not for fifteen years or so?”
I brought up my biggest concern.
“Taecheon's too far. It's not a commutable distance. About three hours by car from home.”
Officer Park Cheon-ro tilted his beer glass and asked a question.
“Do they give you housing?”
“They do.”
“Right. Try it and let us know. I hear the housing in Seoul's great, but I don't know how it works at outlying branches like Taecheon.”
Chewing dried pollock, Kim Ji-hun spoke.
“I've heard some places pool money and hire a housekeeper. They ask for soup and a few side dishes so they can eat breakfast and dinner, or hire someone to clean so the employees don't have to do any of it.”
“Really?”
“They even do the washing and drying. Everyone leaves their clothes in their own basket, and the housekeeper washes them and puts them back. You know Lee Yu-mi, who went to Seoul? She said she doesn't have to do anything at the residence. They get a studio each and live separately.”
The Platonic ideal of company housing. I don't think I should expect that where I'm going.
“I doubt mine's like that. Sounds like they cram all the branch's men into one apartment and tell them to survive.”
When I repeated what Yu had told me, my friends sighed. Gye Eun-yeong frowned.
“Taecheon, you said? I'll ask around.”
“How?”
“My older cousin's at Pyeongan headquarters. She might've heard something.”
Tapping his beer glass with a fingertip, Park Cheon-ro spoke.
“A manager at my branch told me about sharing housing with someone whose mental health wasn't great. Apparently, they'd walk around before dawn knocking on every door. Kept saying they saw ghosts, scattering salt in all the rooms, and crumpling talismans into tiny balls to stick places without the room's occupant knowing. Supposedly, they threw a kitchen knife at the front entrance too, though I don't know whether that's true.”
That's terrifying. How do you live in one house with someone like that for a year, let alone three?
“Thanks. Telling me this before I move in is doing wonders for my mental health.”
“Oh, it won't be that bad. Just a house crawling with cockroaches, a bedbug infestation, rats coming and going. That sort of thing.”
“Right. Once I make friends with the rats and roaches, I'll send them to your place.”
Most of my intake commuted from home. When you joined, you spent four weeks living at the training center while learning the job. Then they asked which regional headquarters you wanted. The ones brimming with dreams and ambition sometimes chose Gangnam in Seoul, but most picked a region they could commute to from home. It was one reason Goldlight Bank recruited provincial people like me. Some, of course, chose Seoul or Gyeonggi to escape where they'd been living.
HR supposedly considered our preferences when assigning us, but I didn't know how it really worked. Someone who requested Jeonbuk could suddenly be sent to Gangwon. That happened about as often as beans sprout in a drought, though. Usually, people seemed to get the region they'd wanted. I'd applied for Pyeongan and received it. So had the friends here.
New recruits rotated among branches within that region every two or three years. By the time they'd worked at ten or fifteen branches, they'd spent their youth at the bank and were in their fifties. Then they reached retirement age and left. I'd had two or three sips of beer when Gye Eun-yeong, who'd been staring at her phone, spoke.
“That Officer Yu who quit apparently didn't have a good reputation. They say his work was a mess and he made loads of mistakes. There's a rumor he was C-grade. And the Taecheon branch you're going to keeps ranking first in sales. You'll get big bonuses, won't you?”
Kim Ji-hun picked up a peanut.
“Really? How does a branch stuck in the middle of nowhere keep coming first?”
Did they squeeze the results out of their employees? C-grade banker was slang for someone bad at the job. The bank sorted people by letters: S, A, B, C. C was the bottom. Slow work, frequent mistakes, poor sales, a huge blunder, causing trouble, getting on the wrong side of a superior. Any of those could make you a C-grade employee.
More striking than the claim that Yu made mistakes was the fact that people at other branches knew about them. Taecheon was so isolated it might as well have been an island, yet other people knew he was supposedly bad at his job. Someone there was diligently spreading rumors all the way to Pyeongan headquarters.
Maybe my reputation's terrible too. Rumors arrive before the person. The Taecheon staff had probably already heard what sort of man I was. What did they think of me? ......Don't think about it now. Worrying will only stress me out.
It had been a while since we'd met. We made the rounds of recently taken finance certification exams, sales pressure, complaints about newly launched products, and unusual customers. By then, we'd each finished a liter of draft beer. We'd met at eight and hadn't seemed to talk for long, yet it was past eleven. Most buses had stopped, so we took taxis home. My parents seemed to be asleep already. The living room was dark, and only a little light burned in the kitchen.
Clothes strewn everywhere and my gaping suitcase greeted me warmly when I returned to my room. The luggage wouldn't pack itself. Somehow, it all had to pass through my hands. I finished packing at one in the morning, then washed. Every item brought back something Yu or my friends had said.
Everyone has it hard. I'm not uniquely miserable. Everyone out there working has it hard.
With effort, I pushed away the creeping anxiety over things that hadn't happened yet. On the outside, I looked composed, smartly dressed in a suit with a little financial knowledge crammed into my head. Inside, I was buried in worry about the rest of my life. How long do I have to live like this? Until my working life ends? Does that mean I'll be happy when I retire? I thought of Kim Seong-a, Hwapyeong's branch manager, who'd retired today. Had the manager looked happy? ......I don't know.