Korean reading — TOPIK II · Work

Mr. Choi, who is fifty-five, has been driving the first bus of the day in our neighborhood for fifteen years.

His day begins when he gets up at three thirty and leaves the bus depot at four thirty.

The first bus is mostly ridden by market vendors and people going to clean office buildings.

Seeing the same faces at the same time every day, they now ask after each other.

If someone asks whether getting up so early isn't hard, he answers that it is rewarding to open the day before everyone else.

He says another good thing is that his work ends at one in the afternoon, so he can spend evenings with his grandchildren.

Of course, when it snows on winter mornings the roads are slippery, so he gets much more tense than usual.

He says that as long as his body allows, he doesn't want to let go of the first bus's steering wheel.

Until last year, working overtime was taken for granted on our team.

Our new team leader, who arrived this year, stops by each team member's desk every Friday afternoon.

Last week, too, she sat down beside my desk and looked over my task list with me, asking whether I had too much work these days.

After hesitating a little, I honestly told her that I had as many as three tasks with overlapping deadlines.

Then she handed one of them to another team member and pushed back the deadline of another by a week.

At first I worried that I would look incompetent, but the quality of my work actually improved.

Now our team has a culture of telling each other what is hard before problems arise.

Even though overtime went down, we were told our results were better than before.

Starting this year, Sua's company allows employees who want it to work four days a week.

In return, since there is one less working day, the salary also goes down a little.

After thinking about it for a long time, Sua applied for the four-day week.

People around her ask whether she's really okay with a lower salary, but to Sua that extra day off is worth more than money.

On her Wednesdays off, she goes to the library and studies for a certificate she had put off for a long time.

Sometimes she feels anxious that she might fall behind her coworkers.

But on working days she concentrates much better than before, so the amount of work she gets done hasn't dropped much.

Sua says it's as if she bought time with a smaller salary, and she's happy with her choice.

In the seven years since I joined the company, I never used even half of my annual leave.

I felt bad for my busy coworkers, so it was always hard to bring up taking time off.

But at the end of last year, seeing my leftover leave simply disappear left me feeling empty.

So on New Year's Day I wrote in my planner, "This year I'm going to use every single day of my leave."

From January I planned my vacations in advance and shared the schedule with my team.

Because I let them know early, the coworkers covering my work had plenty of time to prepare.

This summer, for the first time, I turned off my phone for a week and traveled around Jeju Island with my parents.

When I came back, the company had been running just fine without me.

After his daughter was born, Taeho took a year of parental leave.

On his first day back at the company after the leave, the office was full of unfamiliar things.

The seating had changed, and there were several coworkers he had never seen before.

Looking at the calendar, Taeho asked the coworker next to him, "Wasn't the weekly meeting on Monday mornings, if I remember right?"

The coworker smiled and told him the meeting had moved to Wednesday afternoons half a year ago.

For the first few weeks, Taeho was swamped learning the new ways of working.

Still, thanks to his teammates patiently explaining what he didn't know, he was able to adjust quickly.

Taeho says that juggling childcare and work is hard, but both are precious to him.

Last month I used my company's workation program to spend a week in a seaside village in Gangwon Province.

"Workation" combines the words work and vacation: you work as usual while staying somewhere else.

At first I thought I wouldn't be able to focus on work with the sea in view.

But when I actually tried it, I found that working to the sound of the waves helped me concentrate better than I expected.

In the mornings I joined meetings from a shared office, and at six in the evening I closed my laptop right away.

In the evenings I walked on the beach or tried fish dishes I'd never seen before at local restaurants.

Even after returning to Seoul, I've kept the habit of taking a walk after work.

I learned that just changing where you are can change the way you work.

Hyerin worked at a bank counter for twelve years.

During that time she often met elderly customers who struggled with banking because they weren't used to smartphones.

Strangely enough, helping them was when Hyerin felt the most fulfilled.

In the end she left the bank and began teaching seniors how to use smartphones at a community welfare center.

For Hyerin, this decision was less a change of jobs than a change in the direction of her life.

Her salary went down, but the thanks the seniors give her after class are a great source of strength.

These days she also has many more evenings when she eats dinner with her family.

Hyerin says that to find work you love, you first need to notice when you feel happy.

Seongmin used to make do with a single roll of gimbap at his desk for lunch.

He checked emails even during lunch, so he had never properly rested.

One day, at a coworker's suggestion, he tagged along to a small gukbap restaurant near the office.

When Seongmin started eating hurriedly while looking at his phone, the elderly owner said, "You'll get indigestion. Eat slowly, now."

At those words, Seongmin put his phone in his pocket and slowly savored his food for the first time in a long while.

After that, he decided to go out for lunch at least three times a week.

Getting away from his desk, even briefly, made his head much clearer in the afternoons.

Now Seongmin thinks of the lunch break as time that's essential for doing his job well.

I used to get work messenger notifications even at eleven at night.

I felt uneasy if I replied late, so I couldn't let go of my phone until right before I fell asleep.

Then this spring, the company made a rule banning work contact after hours.

The agreement was that, unless it's urgent, nobody sends messages after seven in the evening.

At first I doubted it would really be followed, but our team leader himself kept the rule strictly.

These days, the only messages that reach my phone in the evening are texts from family and friends.

Thanks to that, I sleep soundly now, and I head to work in the mornings with a lighter step.

I'm realizing that protecting rest time ultimately makes people work better.

Today was my last day at the company I had worked for for eight years.

Starting next month, I'm going to study environmental engineering in graduate school.

It's something I had dreamed of for a long time, but giving up a stable salary wasn't easy.

After I packed up my things in the afternoon, all that was left on my desk was one small potted plant.

A senior colleague had given me that plant on my first day, so I couldn't throw it away.

When I left, my coworkers gathered in the hallway and applauded, cheering on my new start.

Holding the plant in my arms, I cried a little as I walked out of the building.

I'm a bit scared, but now I'm going to try walking the path I truly want.

Last Chuseok, I grumbled to my grandmother that work at my company was too hard these days.

My grandmother smiled and told me a story about my grandfather when he was young.

She said, "I heard that before we married, your grandfather got only two days off a month at the factory."

Back then, she said, even the word vacation was unfamiliar, and working late into the night was normal.

Hearing her, I felt a little ashamed of my complaints.

But she added that those weren't good times; everyone simply suffered too much.

And she urged me to always protect my time with family, even though work matters too.

Since that day, I've been calling my grandmother every weekend to see how she's doing.

Jaehyun, a senior colleague who helped me a lot at work, moved down to Jeju Island three years ago.

His health had declined from working late every day in Seoul, so he started growing tangerines.

At first everyone thought he would soon come back.

But recently I heard from a coworker who had visited Jeju that his face had become so bright he was hardly recognizable.

These days, apparently, he goes out to the fields at sunrise and finishes work at sunset.

His income goes up and down with the weather, but he says he has dinner with his family far more often.

Hearing that made me look back on my own life.

This winter, I plan to take some time off and visit his tangerine orchard myself.

The print shop where I work is a small company with just over ten employees.

In months when orders piled up, we had to run the machines late into the night even on Fridays.

Then one Monday morning, the plant manager gathered the staff and passed on the owner's wishes.

The plant manager told us, "The boss says that from this month, we should all leave at four on Fridays."

In return, we decided to plan our work from Monday to Thursday a bit more carefully.

For the first few weeks, everyone was on edge, worried we wouldn't meet the orders.

But because we had planned the schedule in advance, work didn't pile up even on Friday afternoons.

These days, I wrap up each week by going to the neighborhood pool every Friday evening.

Minjae had worked only from home for two years, but recently the way he works is about to change.

That's because the company proposed that, from next month, everyone work together at the office a few days a week.

Over dinner, his mother asked, "So how many days a week did they say to come in?"

Minjae answered that he only had to go in two days, Tuesday and Thursday.

His mother worried that the long commute might be tiring for him.

But Minjae thought it might not be bad to work face to face with his coworkers after so long.

So he decided to focus on work he does alone on home days and bunch his meetings together on office days.

Minjae resolved to make the most of the strengths of both ways of working.

After spending over a year job hunting since graduating from college, I was completely worn out.

Every time I was rejected at the application stage, I felt like a useless person.

Then one day my uncle, who has run a bakery in the neighborhood for thirty years, called me over to his shop.

Handing me some freshly baked bread, my uncle asked, "If things are hard, would you like to learn how to bake here for a while?"

I hesitated, but in the end I started getting up at four in the morning to learn how to make dough.

It was physically tough, but seeing customers enjoy the bread I made filled me with pride.

Now, half a year later, I'm preparing for a professional bread-baking certificate.

Thanks to my uncle, I learned that getting into a company isn't the only path.

Last Thursday, too, I worked overtime and didn't get into a taxi until after midnight.

When I sighed in the back seat, the elderly driver asked if I was very busy these days.

The driver said that he, too, had once fallen seriously ill after working without rest when he was young.

Then he said, "A doctor once told me that sleep is the best medicine there is."

Those words stayed in my head until I got home.

The next day, I worked up the courage to ask my team leader to readjust my schedule.

Fortunately, my team leader understood my situation and pushed non-urgent tasks to the following week.

These days, no matter how busy I am, I try to sleep seven hours a night.

Eunbi, who works at an advertising agency, hadn't been able to sleep for months and cried over little things.

She finally went to a clinic and was diagnosed with burnout syndrome.

When she got home, her worried elderly landlady asked, "Well, what did the doctor say it was?"

When Eunbi said it came from working too long without rest, the landlady nodded.

After talking it over with her company, Eunbi decided to take three months of leave.

During her leave, she walked in the park every morning and helped the landlady with her small vegetable garden.

As she spent time slowly, working with the soil, she gradually began to sleep well again.

Now, about to return to work, she is determined never again to stake everything on her job.

Sujin, a forty-five-year-old designer, found lately that every afternoon her eyes felt dry and letters looked blurry.

She had spent twenty years staring at a monitor for more than ten hours a day.

After visiting the eye doctor, Sujin told her husband, “The doctor said I should close my eyes for a moment every hour.”

The doctor explained that looking at a screen for a long time makes you blink less, so your eyes dry out easily.

So Sujin set an alarm for every hour, and when it rang she closed her eyes and rested for one minute.

She also got into the habit of going up to the office rooftop at lunch to look at the distant mountains instead of her phone.

After about two weeks, her eyes were less tired in the afternoon and letters began to look sharp again.

Sujin realized that to keep working for a long time, she had to give her eyes time to rest too.

The event-planning company I work for has a lot of events held on weekends.

For the past two months, our team came in every single weekend without fail.

But we weren't given any days off during the week in return, so everyone was wearing out.

In a meeting, Manager Park, who had worked the longest, said, "Just how long does the company expect us to put up with this?"

The team leader nodded at that and put together a record of the team's weekend work.

Then he took the record to the HR team and asked for compensatory days off.

As a result, from next month we'll be able to take as many weekdays off as the weekend days we work.

I learned that rather than just holding in complaints, it's important to speak up with solid evidence.

Fifty-five-year-old Sangcheol had spent nearly thirty years going back and forth between work and home.

Even on weekends, he often just sat in front of the TV with nothing in particular to do.

One day, after coming home from work, Sangcheol told his wife, "Director Kim from the next department suggested we practice choral singing together every Saturday."

His wife, surprised that someone who used to dislike singing would bring it up, urged him to go.

At his first practice, Sangcheol's voice shook so much that he could barely open his mouth.

But as he blended his voice with everyone else's, the week's fatigue seemed to melt away.

A few months later, he got to stand in front of his family at a performance at the local cultural center.

Sangcheol says he's glad he found another side of himself outside of work before retiring.