I tripped over a cone in Crossfit class, and no one cared.
As I stumbled to avoid face planting into further humiliation, everyone kept running with nary a glance back. Except for the guy behind me.
“Have that removed!” He pointed to the cone.
Alas, a friend. His name was Mitch.
We were an unlikely pair. Mitch is twice my age, and has lived 10x more lives. One of those lives included a nine month stint working at a law firm in South Korea, which somehow came up during a grueling back squat workout.
“That job was one long bender,” Mitch grunted out between reps. “Turning down an invitation to a post-work bar hop was career suicide.”
Imagine a job where your boss considers it to be a massive gesture of disrespect to pass over a night of pounding soju shots in favor of going home and getting rest for the next day of work.
To climb higher on the South Korean corporate ladder, one must take the saying “work, hard, play hard” quite seriously.
Mitch painted a vivid picture of corporate debauchery that conjured Wallstreet-esque insanity. The higher up the person in the position, the more it seemed they would drink. It wasn’t uncommon to pass your boss, or your boss’ boss’ boss, passed out cold on the sidewalk during your morning walk to work.
“And absolutely, under no circumstances, were you to acknowledge them when they were like this, even if they were passed out on their office floor.” Mitch said. “It was understood it didn’t matter what state you’re in, as long as you’re at your desk at 9am.”
These weeknight drinking binges are so ingrained in the South Korean work culture there’s a name for them; hoesik.
The tradition of the hoesik generally follows as so; hit happy hour with the corporate fellas, get force fed shots from the higher ups, black out, sing a messy karaoke version of “Drunk in Love” with the CEO, and if you’re lucky; wake up under your desk ready to work another day.
I recently started working at my first job in a corporate environment. My friends in the supply chain, taxes, or legal department regale me with tales of their team’s weekly post work Happy Hours. While none of these gatherings come close to resembling a hoesik, I’ve been kicking myself for choosing to work at the Wellness Center.
It makes sense that my macro-tracking, 4:30 AM rising, type A boss isn’t shoving our team into the potential loving whiskey soaked arms of the 3-5pm hours, but that didn’t make me any less disappointed in missing out on the corporate promise of getting sloppy on the clock. Rather than wallow in self pity, I chose to take matters into my own hands.
I created my own hoesik.
I invited friends from work who’d proven themselves worthy of a long and raucous endeavor. We ordered a round of $6 cocktails at 4pm, and so it began.
In a wonderfully unruly intersection of excuses to tip the bottle back further, that night also happened to be the first Eagles football game of the season. In a typical hoesik and Eagles fan crossover fashion– by 7pm I found myself taking consecutive shots at the bar with coworkers, friends, and strangers alike.
After the Eagles game kick off, I cannot recall a single moment until I found myself walking home at midnight. It was an embarrassingly early turn-in by hoesik standards, but I had to open the Wellness Center at six in the morning.
As I passed by my work building on the walk, my thoughts started to spiral into a puddle of dread. I wouldn’t be home for another forty minutes, I’d have to wake up at five to catch the train to get to work on time, and do it all horribly hungover…
And that’s when I decided to climb a rung higher the South Korean corporate ladder, and act like one of the higher ups.
I turned around and headed inside my work building. I knew the perfect spot to blissfully and privately pass out. A tiny corner closet, closed to prying eyes by a privacy-protective door latch lock.
When I got off the elevator, a janitor rolled a floor sweeper machine down the hallway. He eyed me, but said nothing except, “go birds.”
“Go birds,” I mumbled back, too far gone from reality to bother questioning if what was happening could possibly be real.
I tumbled into the closet, and latched the lock behind me. Piling up a few gym towels into a nest, I managed to grasp onto the coherence of mind long enough to set an alarm for 5:45 AM.
When I opened my eyes again, the cloudy in-between drunk and hungover state of my mind was enough to tell me morning had arrived. As I silenced my alarm, a text popped up from my boss.
Great Eagles game last night! Gym should be slow today– take the day off.
I threw the towels in the dirty bin, and scampered down a back stairwell like a rat, evading my boss–and a very awkward conversation.
As I walked down a back street, I let out a sigh of relief.
I descended down the rungs of the South Korean Corporate ladder, casting the cloak of the drunken night before to reveal the hungover American working schmuck I am.
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