Three Months In, Still Deciding

Questions Are for Fridays Only

Unless something is urgent, I always hold my questions until Friday.

Maybe it was because the weekend was near, but at least to me, the coworker training me always seemed a little more relaxed on Fridays. So instead of voicing each question as it comes up during the workday, I tuck it away in a corner of my notes and wait until Friday to ask it cautiously.

What was different between last month’s materials and this month’s? Was there a fixed schedule or a clear standard for the tasks that kept coming back? Small questions, depending on how you looked at them.

But even on Fridays, the answers were no gentler. I was chided for asking again about something that had already been explained by email, and my trainer’s face quickly hardened.

I was inundated with emails I had been copied on. I strained to trace the course of the work through them. Nine times out of ten, there was probably a sentence somewhere in that pile that I had missed.

Sometimes the fault was plainly mine. Other times, a strange sense of unfairness rose in me. Either way, I became the guilty party, lowering my head by reflex.

Even as I frantically searched my inbox for the passage I had missed, I was busy weighing whether to apologize first or make some feeble excuse.

Learning the Job Between Emails

I had never expected a neatly organized manual when I joined. I only hoped the instructions themselves would be a little clearer.

My trainer’s explanations always passed by in a blur. Instead of the context of the job unfolding in order, instructions came in abrupt starts and stops.

I wrote everything down. I reopened old emails and tried to make sense of the work by joining the scattered pieces. I wanted to know what I was doing and why.

But to my trainer, I may simply have looked like a frustrating new hire who kept asking about work that had already been explained.

Anything I overlooked at work came back as a much larger mess to clean up. Filling those gaps pushed the end of the workday later and later, and on quite a few nights I carried home what I had failed to finish in the field.

I still do not know whether all that effort was going in the right direction. But I was, without question, doing my best.

The more I was blamed, the more I questioned my own ability instead of tracing the tangled flow of the work. Was I simply too slow to grasp things? Had there ever been a proper explanation to begin with? Or was the whole situation a mess? I had no way to tell.

Well, shutting up and doing as you’re told is supposed to be part of working life. But carrying out tasks blindly, without knowing what I was doing or why, wore me down far more than I had expected.

Still, I Liked the Work

I quite liked the work itself. When a traffic-control unit out in the field malfunctioned, replacing a part or setting up the program again felt much like building computers, something I enjoyed doing from time to time.

No matter how complicated a device looked, once I opened the cover, every component had a role and meshed with the others exactly as it should.

More than anything, I liked the time I spent going from place to place on my own.

Driving through central Seoul all day was exhausting, but moving from site to site suited me far better than being pinned to one spot and enduring the day there.

My relationships with the rest of the team were not especially difficult, and it was not as though I hated everything about the company. That only made it harder to rush to a conclusion.

My trainer must have had difficulties of their own. Keeping up with their workload while looking after a new hire could not have been easy.

At least this much was clear: we were out of step in the way we passed work between us.

Instead of deciding straight away whose fault it was, I chose to think of it as a situation that was wearing us both down. Of course, looking at it that way did not make the next round of questions disappear.

Days When I Want to Quit

On days that felt especially unfair and overwhelming, the thought of quitting circled my mind without fail.

I would open a job site without any real plan and peer into the other worlds on the screen. Was there really somewhere better than this? Did a workplace that fit me a little better even exist?

Then it occurred to me that perhaps I was forcing myself to come up with a reason I had to leave.

Unable to bring myself to submit a single application, I quietly closed the window.

I could not tell whether I was trying to run away because I still hadn’t adjusted to this place, or whether I was trying hard to ignore a reason I should have left long ago.

I needed a paycheck every month to make a living, and I had responsibilities to my family too.

But I could not tell whether it was right to keep holding on and hope my relationship with my trainer would improve on its own. If things kept going this way, what was I supposed to do?

Nights When I Don’t Turn On the Computer

I could barely remember the last time I had become deeply absorbed in anything. More and more often, I would collapse in my room after work and do nothing but look at my phone, then rush to get ready for the next day as if being chased.

I used to have plenty of hobbies. Simply picking up my iPad brought a flood of things to do.

I would draw without thinking, or open the Millie’s Library reading app and read whatever book caught my eye. Many days, I took the iPad to a café and sorted through my thoughts by writing whatever came to mind over a cup of coffee.

A projector sits in one corner of my room. Simply watching Netflix projected onto the white wall made life feel pretty good.

And the computer. I would sit in front of it for hours without moving, whether I was playing a game or working on something.

But now those devices sit quietly abandoned in the corner. I have reached the point where I do not even press the computer’s power button.

I do not know whether this listlessness is what people call burnout or merely the residue of a punishing day. Now I close each day by staring blankly at the ceiling.

It has been three months since I joined. Has it only been three months, or have I already managed to endure three whole months?

Still, it weighs on me that I am letting more and more nights pass before a black monitor, unable even to turn it on.