Nowhere to Be Found

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In 1988 I was temping at a university in Gyeonggi Province.

Mostly what I did there was send lecture requests to part-time instructors, make adjustments to their class schedules, mail them their pay stubs, and field complaints from students. As far as the work went, I didn’t have any major complaints of my own. It was the kind of clerical work that anyone could have done without any special qualifications or expertise. As long as you had a decent memory and an elementary work ethic, there was nothing to fear. In other words, it bore no resemblance at all to the type of job you could get only after having studied hard for years and years, turned in thousands upon thousands of pages of reports, written a tome of a thesis, earned a degree, and created a winning résumé composed entirely in English.

At this job we could chew gum or do our nails while answering the phones and take over two hours to type even the sparsest syllabus. We weren’t lazy or indifferent or anything. It was just the nature of the work. The office got a lot of visitors, so it wasn’t unusual for me to make more than twenty cups of coffee in a single day. Of course, it was muddy instant coffee.

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