Category: Work

Today is the last day. Five days of summer vacation, done tomorrow at 8am, and I am already feeling sick about it. Not tired-sick. Just dread. It’s like the night before a blood test almost, you know it’s coming and there’s nothing you can do, except this one lasts a whole year minus five days.

If you are not from here, you probably heard “Korean company mandatory summer vacation” and thought, wait, that sounds nice, a company that gives you a week off. It is not what it sounds like. Let me explain how this actually works, because the name of the thing hides what it really is.

It’s a shutdown, not really a vacation

In a lot of Korean companies, especially small and mid-size manufacturing places like mine, the whole factory just closes for a set week, usually early-to-mid August, sometimes late July, depends on the company. This is called 일제휴무 — everyone off, all at once. It’s different from your regular annual leave (연차) that you can use whenever you want. And here’s the part that actually stings a little — at a lot of small places, this 일제휴무 week gets counted against your 연차 too. So you’re not even getting extra days. You’re just getting told which of your own vacation days you’re allowed to use. The company picks the dates, not you. You don’t apply for it. You don’t negotiate it. One day someone posts a notice on the wall or in the group chat, “factory closed Aug 4 to Aug 8,” and that’s it, that’s your vacation.

Why do factories do this instead of letting people take turns? Because of the production line. If you only send half the workers on vacation and keep the line running with the other half, you need someone to cover, someone to train, someone to babysit the machines while the regular guy is gone. Way easier to just stop the whole line for a week, shut off the equipment, and start it back up together. Bigger companies with more staff can sometimes afford to rotate people through vacation weeks without the line ever fully stopping. Small place like mine, we don’t have the headcount for that. One line down for one person just doesn’t work the same way, so everybody goes at once.

And because most factories around here land on the same two or three weeks of August, the timing is brutal for anyone trying to travel. Highways turn into parking lots. The rest stops on the expressway are just a wall of people. Everyone’s shutdown week lands on the same calendar days because everyone is trying to dodge the exact same peak, and they all dodge into the exact same spot. It happens like this every single year and somehow it still surprises people.

More days off does not mean more freedom

This is the part I think foreign readers get backwards the most. You hear “company shuts down for five days, everyone gets paid” and your brain goes, that’s generous. But the actual feeling living it is kind of the opposite. It’s a loss of control, not a gift. I didn’t choose these five days. If my son had something going on those exact days, tough luck. If I wanted to go somewhere in late July when the roads are still clear, I can’t, because the company set the dates around what’s convenient for the factory, not for me.

Bigger companies with more departments sometimes let people stagger their weeks a bit, or throw in a couple extra personal days so there’s some room to move. Small manufacturing companies mostly don’t bother. You get your five days, attached to whatever week the company picked, and that’s the whole negotiation. Some companies count Saturday and Sunday inside the five days, so really you’re only getting three actual weekdays off — I’ve heard this happens a lot, though at my place the count is the five straight days regardless of weekend. Depends entirely on the owner, there’s no standard rule across the country for this.

Going back is worse than the vacation was good

This is the thing nobody really talks about, and it’s basically why I’m typing this instead of just enjoying the last night. In a small workplace, everybody remembers everything. There’s no crowd to hide in. If a big company has three hundred people in one department, one guy’s mistake from two months ago gets buried under three hundred other things happening. In a small factory with a few dozen people who’ve worked together for years, nothing gets buried. It gets remembered, and it comes back out any time something even a little similar happens again.

I made mistakes at work before. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, and I’m not asking for sympathy about it — it was on me. But because of that, now when I come back from vacation and things aren’t perfectly smooth for the first day or two, which is completely normal after five days off, I know people look at it differently for me than they would for someone with a clean record. A small mistake gets read as “here we go again” instead of just a small mistake. Nobody writes any of this down officially. Nobody has to. Everyone just remembers, and that’s basically the same thing as a record, it just lives in people’s heads instead of on paper.

So the five days off didn’t really feel like rest by the end. More like sitting in the waiting room before something you don’t want to happen happens. The actual relaxing part was maybe the first two or three days. By tonight, day five, my head’s already back at the shop floor — whether the machine I run is going to start up clean or give trouble after sitting idle a week, whether the boss is going to be short with people tomorrow because a shutdown week costs the company money and makes nothing back.

The drive back is its own punishment

One thing that never comes up when people talk about this — the commute itself changes completely depending on when you leave. My drive to work is about 25 minutes outside of rush hour. During the actual commute window, same exact distance, it’s over an hour. So tomorrow, first day back, already tired, already dreading it, I’m also driving straight into the worst version of that drive, because everyone else around here is restarting their week at the same time too. No easing into it. No half-day. Straight into a full 08:00 to 20:30 shift, like the five days off never happened.

That schedule is twelve and a half hours counting the break, and I’m honestly not sure how it stacks up against other shops around here, but at mine it’s not unusual, especially when they’re running short-staffed. After five days of waking up whenever, coffee whenever, that first morning back at those hours just hits different. It’s not really “Monday blues.” It’s worse than that because it’s not even a normal Monday. It’s the first day back after a full week where the line just sat there, dead, and now everyone’s watching to see if things start up without a hiccup.

Where the five days actually went

People wonder what workers here even do with five forced days off landing the exact same week the whole country is also off. Some people travel anyway and just accept the traffic as the price of it, mostly because it’s the one window their kids are also off school. Some people just stay home, because between crowded beaches, jammed roads, and hotel prices spiking hard that exact week, staying home ends up being the actually reasonable choice. I’m the second kind, mostly. I don’t go far most weekends of the year anyway — closest I get out is the convenience store downstairs or Tous Les Jours where my son works part time — so this wasn’t dramatically different for me, just longer.

The five days themselves were fine, honestly. Coffee in the morning, slower mornings, watched some stuff with my son in the evening, no alarm going off. It’s the last day of it that always gets ruined, every single year, just from knowing what’s waiting on the other side. I don’t think I’m alone in this either. I think most people working in offices and factories here know this exact feeling — like Sunday night dread, except it’s been building for five days and it lands on a Tuesday instead. Anyway. Alarm’s set for tomorrow. Guess I’ll find out how the machine starts up.

Everybody at my company ate hanwoo last Friday and I wasn’t there. That’s it, that’s the whole embarrassing story. Beef I didn’t get to eat is bothering me more than it should, and under that there’s a second thing bothering me that’s harder to say, which is what people probably thought when I wasn’t in the room.

Hoesik, the team dinner, is where a lot of your standing at a Korean company actually gets decided. Not in the review meeting, not on paper. Nobody writes down that you’re supposed to go — companies can’t officially require it, because if it’s outside working hours it starts to look like unpaid time you were forced into, and that’s not something a boss wants to explain to a labor office. So on paper it’s voluntary. In practice, whether you showed up or not gets remembered, longer than most things that actually happen during work hours do.

The structure is simple. Team dinner, decided that day or the day before usually, near the office because after 20:30 nobody wants to drive far, a table for eight to twelve people. Most nights it’s samgyeopsal or some jjigae place, I’d guess under 20,000 won a person, company card or split with the team budget, I’m honestly not sure which every time. But sometimes the boss picks somewhere nicer, and hanwoo is the nicer choice. Korean beef, way more expensive than the imported stuff — I think it runs something like 40,000 to 60,000 won a person depending on the cut, could be more if somebody orders without looking at the price. When hanwoo shows up as the plan, everyone already knows it’s a slightly bigger night. Good quarter, boss in a good mood, doesn’t really matter why. You go to that one especially.

Why I wasn’t there

I had other business that Friday. That’s really all I can say about it, it wasn’t anything I want to get into here. I found out after the fact it was hanwoo night, and I sat there annoyed at myself in two separate ways, which is a strange thing to notice about yourself but I noticed it.

First one’s simple. I like hanwoo, it’s not something I buy for myself, and I missed a free good meal. Plain disappointment, nothing complicated about it.

Second one is the one I keep turning over. It’s wondering how my not being there gets read. If some twenty-something on the team skips a dinner, nobody thinks about it twice, busy, tired, has plans, fine. If I skip one, in my head there’s a version where it gets filed under the same old thing — not because missing one dinner is a big deal on its own, but because there’s already a file with my name on it, and anything that isn’t crystal clear tends to get sorted into whatever’s already in that file.

The file that doesn’t close

Here’s the part that’s hard to explain if you haven’t lived it. I made a mistake at work a while back. I’m not going to lay out what it was, that’s between me and the people there, but I own it, it was mine to own. The thing about a mistake once you’re past fifty and the same fifteen people have watched you for years — it doesn’t stay in the past the way you want it to. It turns into a lens people look through. Something small later, forgetting a step, mislabeling a shipment, showing up a couple minutes late, normally that’s nothing. But once your boss and coworkers already have a story about who you are, the small thing gets pulled into that story instead of standing on its own.

I don’t think anybody’s out to get me over it. It’s just how memory works when you see the same faces every single day for years straight. People don’t reset their opinion of you every morning. They carry the last strong impression and update it slow, if they update it at all. Younger guys get “still figuring it out” as an excuse. Older workers don’t get that phrase said about them nearly as much — the assumption is you should already know better by now, so when you slip, it doesn’t read as a rookie mistake, it reads like a character thing.

I don’t have the exact number in my head but I know a lot of workplaces here look like mine now — older. Factories, fabrication shops, sites like the one I work at, plenty of guys in their 50s still doing physical work, not because they love it but because the birth rate dropped and there just aren’t enough younger people coming in behind us. What that means for me practically is there’s a lot of us sitting in these rooms getting watched through some old lens, and we’ve got fewer years left at the company to earn our way out of it than a 27 year old has. A younger guy can have a bad stretch and still have fifteen, twenty years ahead of him to slowly become someone else in everyone’s eyes. I don’t have that kind of runway here, and everyone including me kind of knows it without saying it.

What people get wrong about the fear

When people talk about hierarchy in Korea from outside, it’s always “the boss is scary,” some intimidating guy behind a desk. Sometimes true. But honestly the coworkers’ opinion of you is scarier day to day than the boss’s. The boss sees you in bursts, a report here, a meeting there, one hoesik. The coworkers see you all day every day, they’re the ones who notice a pattern forming, and their small comments and looks add up into an atmosphere you can feel walking in the door. A boss forgets things faster than the guy two seats over who’s watched the same thing happen three times.

The other thing people get wrong is thinking one mistake follows you around forever, permanently stuck to you. That’s not quite it. What actually happens is the chances to get it off you are rare. Nobody sits you down and tells you you’re forgiven. There’s no moment where it officially resets. It just takes a long stretch of being boring and reliable, and even then it’s other people who decide when that’s been enough — you don’t get to decide you’ve paid it off yourself.

And the culture around skipping dinners has actually loosened up, that part’s true. I remember hearing from older guys when I was younger that you basically didn’t say no to hoesik unless you were in the hospital, that’s just how it was back then. Now younger employees turn down the invite and nothing happens to them. But that loosening only really helps the people who don’t already have a file open. If you’re in good standing, skipping reads as respecting your own time. If you’re in my spot, skipping the exact same dinner risks reading as avoiding the team, or not taking it seriously — still. Same exact thing, read two different ways, depending on what came before it.

So what do you actually do

There’s no clean trick to it, honestly. What I do is show up to the ones I can show up to, even the cheap samgyeopsal nights nobody would notice me skipping, because just being there over and over is the only thing that slowly buys anything back. I try not to be the guy who leaves early. I don’t drink much anymore either — drinking used to be a bigger part of the whole bonding thing at these dinners, that’s just how it went for years here — but lately those nights aren’t fun the way they used to be for me, because I’m half enjoying the food and half watching how I’m coming across, and that second part is tiring in a way that’s got nothing to do with the soju.

I missed the hanwoo. I’ll go to the next one. That’s really the whole plan, if you can even call it a plan — keep showing up, keep doing the boring version of the job right, and hope eventually the new boring version of me weighs more than the old story in people’s heads. It’s slow. Some weeks I honestly can’t tell if it’s working. But I don’t know a faster way through it, and at this point in my life, faster isn’t really something I get to choose anyway.

Still bothered about missing that beef hoesik. My company had one last Friday, chose Hanwoo of all things, and I couldn’t go because my shift is 08:00 to 20:30. Regular day shift, not late. I wasn’t dodging it, I just physically was not there when it happened. But in a small metal fab shop, when you say “I had work” for missing the good dinner, people don’t always take it simple like that.

People outside Korea hear the word hoesik and think it means company dinner, that’s it. It’s more than that. Hoesik is really about who shows up, who pours for who, who leaves early — the food is almost the secondary thing. A hoesik table shows you the whole office hierarchy in two hours, more than watching people at their desks for a month would.

What actually happens

A normal hoesik starts after work, around 6 or 7pm, and there’s almost always alcohol. Soju, beer, somaek (soju mixed into beer), whatever the boss prefers that day. Seating isn’t random. The most senior person, boss or department head, sits at the head or the center of the table, and everyone else just arranges around that without anybody saying so out loud. Nobody hands out a seating chart but somehow everyone lands in the right spot anyway.

Pouring has rules too. Two hands, or one hand with the other arm supporting it, when you pour for someone senior. You fill their glass before your own. You don’t pour your own drink when someone senior is sitting close, that’s seen as a little rude, like you couldn’t wait for them. I hear this is loosening up in the big Seoul office jobs. On a factory floor like mine, it’s still very much alive, nobody skips it.

The menu tells you something too. Samgyeopsal or fried chicken means a normal, no-big-deal hoesik, nothing was planned specially — I’d guess something like 15,000 to 20,000 won a head with drinks included, though prices move around depending on the place. Hanwoo is a completely different signal. Korean beef isn’t cheap, I think it runs somewhere in the 40,000 to 60,000 won range per person just for the meat, sometimes more depending on the cut, and if the company or the boss is paying for that, everyone reads the message the same way — this time we’re celebrating something, or the boss wants to make things right about something. You don’t just skip a Hanwoo night for no reason.

Nobody tells you this bit

The story you usually hear is “hoesik isn’t mandatory anymore, young workers push back, culture is changing.” That’s true for some companies. Big city office job, sure, some of that pressure has eased off.

But a small manufacturing company, maybe 30-40 people total like mine, none of that really applies the same way. Showing up is still basically a loyalty test wearing a dinner as a costume. Everyone notices who came, what time they left, one drink or five. And the next morning at the factory, all of it gets talked about — small company, small group of people, so everything gets noticed and remembered a lot longer than it would somewhere bigger.

This part gets complicated for me specifically. I made real mistakes here before, and I know I did — that’s just fact. I’m trying to fix that now, but a small slip still gets connected in people’s heads to how I used to be, so I feel like I’m being watched a little closer than someone with a clean record would be. A hoesik is one of the few times the boss is relaxed instead of watching the floor, pouring drinks and just talking, not supervising anything. Missing this one, the good one, feels like losing a chance I don’t get that often. That Friday I just went home like usual, made coffee the next morning same as always, didn’t do anything special, but I kept thinking about it all weekend.

The excuse calculation

When someone skips a hoesik here, they usually say something simple — something came up, family thing, whatever. But everyone at the table is quietly doing math about whether that’s real or not. If the boss picked an expensive menu and is paying for it himself, skipping without a very solid reason is close to the one hoesik you don’t miss.

My reason actually was real though, my shift goes 08:00 to 20:30, there’s no version of that where I show up even for the last hour. But real or not, being physically unable to go doesn’t make the awkward feeling go away, the feeling of not being there when the good meat came out. That’s the annoying part about it. I didn’t choose this.

2차, and why it doesn’t stop at dinner

A lot of outside writing skips this — hoesik traditionally isn’t one stop. There’s 1차 (ilcha), the first place, usually the meal itself. Then 2차 (icha), a second spot, used to be almost automatic and now depends more on the company. Icha is often a bar or a noraebang, sometimes both if the night runs long. A noraebang room for a small group, I’d guess maybe 15,000 to 25,000 won an hour, though it depends a lot on the neighborhood and whether it’s a weekend, plus drinks — people grab soju or beer from the convenience store next door before going in because the noraebang’s own drink prices are rough.

This two or three stage thing used to be close to mandatory in a lot of places, especially manufacturing and construction type industries. It’s shortened over the years, a lot of companies stop after ilcha now, since overtime and next-day work got looked at more carefully with the 52-hour workweek law. But it hasn’t disappeared everywhere. Some companies, especially with an older boss, still expect at least a short icha, even one quick round somewhere before people actually go home.

Who pays, and how much

For a normal hoesik, the company or department budget usually covers it, sometimes split between the company card and the boss personally covering the “extra” stuff at 2차. Nobody splits the bill Dutch-style at a hoesik the way you might with friends, that would look strange, almost like you don’t trust the company or the boss to handle it. When a boss personally treats everyone to something like Hanwoo, people notice, and it does buy some goodwill for a while.

A full night, ilcha plus icha, for maybe 10 people, can add up past a million won pretty easily once you count good beef, soju, beer, a couple hours at a bar or noraebang after. That’s something like 700 to 800 US dollars for one evening, I’m not totally sure on the exact conversion these days, but for a company trying to boost morale or celebrate a good quarter, that gets treated as a normal cost, not something crazy.

So who gets to skip it

In theory anybody can say no now. In practice some excuses work better than others. Someone with young kids, someone pregnant, someone with a doctor’s appointment, these usually get accepted without much pushback. Someone who’s just tired, or doesn’t feel like drinking that night, has a much harder case to make, especially if they haven’t been around long enough to have earned that kind of freedom yet.

Shift workers are a weird middle case. My missing it wasn’t a choice, it was just my schedule, but people still process it through the same lens as any other excuse — was it good enough, was it real, does it forgive me for not being there. There’s no rule anywhere that says shift workers get an automatic pass. It just depends on how much goodwill you already have with people. That’s the part that bothers me a little, because goodwill is exactly the thing I’m still working on getting back.

Anyway. Next time there’s a good one, I hope the schedule lines up. Hanwoo doesn’t show up on the menu that much.