So Saturday I busted my ankle. The way I busted my ankle was in the process of doing something hilarious and maybe illegal (Is it against the law to cross into a business that's open by entering from the roof from another roof?). So I took 2 days off work to heal up. I really shouldn't be walking yet, but if I take 3 days off I have to get a note from the Hospital. Koreans LOVE TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL. If you have a sniffle they'll be like: "Did you go to the hospital?" and I'm like "No" and they're like "GO TO THE HOSPITAL".
So I hobble to work this morning looking like a crazy man (My shoe wouldn't fit my swollen foot, so I wore one shoe and one slipper) and make a joke out of it. I drew a bite mark on my arm and told all my kids I was a zombie and chased them around for awhile. So it eventually transpires that I have no class today or the rest of the week. Wow, good thing I showed up, right? So I decide to just sit at my desk and screw around for the rest of the day.
I do this for about 40 minutes when they come to my desk and tell me "We must go stamping. Many stamps, okay?" and I'm like "But my foot is fuuuu" and they're like "Principal make request lets go" and because I'm a pussy I was like "FINE WHATEVER". So we go upstairs into this SWELTERING OFFICE and there is a comically huge stack of paper. It's the largest stack of paper I've ever seen outside of a movie about HOW TERRIBLE OFFICE WORK IS. It's probably close to a thousand sheets of paper. It's huge. And they sit me down at a table and they're like "Here's a rubber stamp, stamp every page". I figure I'll just put my back into it and bust it out and so I start stamping these pages.
I get like maybe 200 pages done and my, uh, handler, who is standing over my shoulder tut-tutting me everytime a stamp is mis-aligned, is like "Ohhhh red ink no good. blue! blue ink" and hands me a blue stamp pad. We eventually work it out that I will not be the one to restamp the previous 200 or so pages. I power through the rest (The Koreans keep holding a pow wow about whether or not a stamp is good enough, aligned enough or whatever. There's a whole invisible field of criteria I'm not privvy to). It takes like an hour but I bust through the whole stack and then there's this gem:
"Starting with tomorrow, is Spring Vacation. How many vacation days do you want?"
"Uh. All of them?"
"Well, you dont have many vacation days left"
"Right, but it's Spring Vacation"
"No,no. Take take vacation, you must use vacation days. Otherwise you will come in"
"Who else will be here?"
"No other peoples. This is school keeper's phone number. When you come in morning, call him and he will come and unlock school for you to sit"
6 months.
