Three Months In, Still Deciding

Questions Only on Fridays

Unless something is urgent, I save my questions up for Friday.

Maybe it was the weekend waiting just ahead — at least to my eye, the senior assigned to train me seemed to be in a better mood on Fridays. So instead of speaking up whenever a question surfaced during the day, I tucked each one into a corner of a notepad, stacked them up, and waited until Friday to ask, carefully.

What was the difference between last month’s file and this month’s. Whether the work that came around again and again had a set schedule, or any clear standard behind it. Small questions, really.

But Friday arriving didn’t soften the answers that came back. Why was I asking again about something already covered in an email — and with that, his face would harden.

What came down on me instead was an avalanche of emails I had been CC’d on. I thrashed around in all that text, straining to trace the shape of the work somehow. Nine times out of ten, a sentence I had missed was hiding somewhere in there. Either I was too new to have spotted it, or it was something I should never have missed.

There were moments when the fault was plainly mine, and moments when something oddly close to resentment rose in my throat. But whatever the situation, I turned into the guilty party by reflex. Even while scrambling with the mouse to find the line I had overlooked, half my mind was busy weighing whether to lead with an apology or a flimsy excuse.

Learning the Job Between Emails

I never expected a neatly kept manual waiting for me on my first day. I only hoped the instructions themselves might be a little clearer.

His explanations always went by in passing. Instead of the context of a task unfolding in order, fragments of instruction arrived in blunt, disconnected pieces. The blanks in between I had to fill on my own, digging through the CC’d emails piled up in my inbox.

I wrote things down diligently. I reopened old emails, pieced the scattered fragments together, tried to make sense of it somehow. I wanted to know what I was doing and why. But in his eyes I was probably just the slow junior asking again about work he had already explained.

A thing missed once came back as a bigger thing to clean up. Filling those gaps pushed my leaving time back indefinitely, and there were plenty of nights when I dragged home what I hadn’t finished on site. Whether I was pouring my effort in the right direction, I still don’t know. But I was certainly giving it everything.

The more the reprimands piled up, the more I blamed my own incompetence instead of looking at the tangle in the work itself. Whether I was slow to take the job in, whether there had ever been a proper explanation to begin with, or whether the whole thing was simply a mess — there was no way to tell. Whatever the truth was, I was lost either way.

Well — doing as you’re told without asking is a working person’s fate, or so they say.

Still, moving my hands and feet blindly with no idea what I was doing or why left a fatigue far deeper than I had expected.

And Yet I Liked the Work

The job itself I liked quite a lot. When something went wrong with a controller out on site, the sequence of swapping a part or setting the program up again was a fair bit like building a computer, which I had enjoyed now and then. However complicated a machine looked, once you got the cover off, the parts were all there doing their honest jobs, meshing together.

Most of all, I liked the hours spent moving around on my own. Maybe that was the greatest comfort of all.

There was the grind of holding a steering wheel in the middle of Seoul all day, but going from site to site suited my temperament far better than sitting nailed to an assigned desk. My relationships with the team weren’t especially hard, and it wasn’t that I couldn’t stand the sight of the place. The work wasn’t a bad fit for me either — which made it all the harder to come to any quick conclusion.

He must have had his own troubles. Clearing your own workload while raising a new hire on top of it can’t be easy. To him, someone who kept digging for reasons, wanting to see the whole flow first, probably looked like a maddeningly slow junior. I may have been wearing him out just as much.

The way we handed work back and forth was out of sync. I always wanted to know why; he seemed to feel that telling me what needed doing once was enough. Our conversations rarely reached each other; they just spun.

In the end I decided to write it off as nothing more than two people wearing each other down. Though deciding that didn’t exactly clear the next questions out of my head.

The Days I Want to Quit

On the days that felt especially unfair and especially heavy, the word quit would circle my head without fail.

I would open a job site with no real plan and peer into the other world on the screen. Was there somewhere better than here. Did an environment that fit me a little more closely even exist. Staring blankly into the light of the monitor, I would suddenly ask myself whether I was forcing reasons to leave out of thin air.

In the end I closed the window quietly, without pushing my résumé through to a single one of them.

Sticking it out isn’t always the answer, but running isn’t always right either. Whether I was truly seeing this stretch of time through, or just working hard at not looking at the real reason to go — I had no way of knowing, and that left me nowhere.

The wall of reality was far too high to throw a resignation letter over right now. There was a tight life that only kept moving because a paycheck landed on time each month, and there was my share of a weight I carry quietly under the word family. Quitting wasn’t a card I could toss out lightly just because my mood had turned.

But whether it was right to hold on, hoping the awkwardness between us would sort itself out, I couldn’t say either. I get on fine with the rest of my coworkers, and I like this job well enough on its own terms. Still — if this knot never comes loose, what exactly am I supposed to do.

The Nights I Don’t Turn the Computer On

Day by day, quietly but unmistakably, ordinary life pressed down on my shoulders. Even the memory of the last time I had fallen deep into something had gone distant. Coming home to collapse in an empty room, eyes handed over to the light of a phone, getting ready for tomorrow as if chased — that had become the whole of my life.

There was a time when I had more hobbies than I could keep up with. Just picking up the iPad Pro sent a hundred things to do spilling out. I would draw without thinking about it, or open a reading app and pick whatever book my hand landed on. There were plenty of days I took the iPad to a café, spread it out with a cup of coffee, and sorted my thoughts by writing something rambling.

There is a projector in one corner of the room. Just leaning into the glow of Netflix spilling across the white wall made life feel pretty good. And the computer. Once I sat down in front of it, I could stay there for hours without moving. Games or work, my whole life flowed through the world beyond that monitor.

But now those devices have lost their warmth. They simply lie abandoned in a corner of the room, silent as if dead.

It got to the point where I don’t even press the computer’s power switch anymore.

Whether this heavy listlessness is what people call burnout, or just the residue a hard day leaves behind, I still can’t say. What is clear is that someone who used to want things so fiercely now closes out the day staring at the ceiling. Whoever I am at the moment, I am thoroughly not the person I knew.

Three months in, now. Is it only three months, or have I already held on for three whole months.

When the awkward air around him will lift, whether I will be broken in and resigned to this bleak grammar, or whether I will turn my back on the place without a second thought — I still can’t gauge any of it.

All I know is what nags at me: that the nights keep piling up, one after another, when I sit in front of a monitor gone black and never manage to turn it on.