Heat: Who Needs it?

I'm going to preface this post with the two following points:

1) I have a tendency to label everything that I don't understand as dumb. Flawed, but this is how I'm wired.
2) All of the other people that I know in Korea (three) are able to heat their apartment whenever they please.

Onward:

It went down to 2 degrees Celcius the other night. For those of you not familiar with how Busan works, this qualifies as mother fucking cold. Essentially, Busan waited until the 1st of November to turn on Autumn. Just last week, I was wearing a skirt and no sweater. Last week.

Being mother fucking cold, I decided that it was time to retire the air conditioner and turn on the heat. Having a heated floor is more or less my favourite thing about Korea. Unfortunately, my floor's failure to cooperate killed my buzz. Six hours and no dice; it was still mother fucking cold.

Anger began to set in. I cursed at Korea in my head several times before doing the productive thing and whining about it on facebook. I then contemplated cursing at myself for not knowing what the words on my heating control mean (really, there's no excuse for that at this point), before retiring that idea on account of absurdity (it's never my fault). Finally, I made a last ditch effort to push all of the buttons on heating control until presto! It worked. It turns out that I had left the shower-timer on and could have avoided the anger phase entirely had I known that was what that button did.

This is how I do Tuesdays.

The next day I spoke to a friend of mine, who was complaining about the heat in her building. It turns out that she's not an idiot, and the her building is actually broken. The rules, which apply to every unfortunate apartment in her broken building, are as follows:

1) The heat will only work between the hours of 4-6am, and 8-10pm.
2) If you wish to preset the heating control so that it is ready to go at those times, should you not be home or alert when it's time to flick the switch, you must pay for gas during the time that it wasn't actually working.
3) If you aren't available during the 4 hours that the building allows you to heat your apartment, and you don't preset the heating control, you may as well open all of your windows and hope that a warm gust of air blows in, because your apartment is going to be mother fucking cold. Buy a hat.

"That is too dumb to be true", was the only possible response. Part of my brain died as she explained that her fiance, who is Korean, had argued the matter at length with the building manager, to no avail. Not only is it true, but it's not just a matter of Random Foreigner Not Getting It (as is occasionally the case with yours truly).

Since hearing of this, I have made a point of complaining about it several times a day. Frankly, I don't have any of my own shit to complain about this week and don't feel entirely whole unless I do. This serves as an appropriate substitute until trouble finds me again.




Comments

If you feel the need to

If you feel the need to constantly complain at things why don't you look at your own country and start complaining about stuff? I'm sure this wouldn't be too hard to do. Oh wait, why don't you look at yourself? Can't even read Korean and can't even turn on the heating system! WOW, that was worth writing(and in my case reading) a 1000 word essay! I was entertained indeed (by your virtually low IQ).

By the way, no need to use such a low quality language such as "mother fucking" when you want to describe something.

Ah. and what does "I cursed at Korea" means? In your country (probably the United States I presume?), everytime something goes wrong you 'curse at the USA" in your head?

On a final note: the fact that you have a tendency to label everything that you don't understand as dumb shows a lot about your actual intelligence, shall I say. If a person (you), don't understand something, I'm wondering what is more dumb, the thing the person cannot understand, or the person itself who cannot understand it...

 

 

 Two things, wakhold: "If you

 Two things, wakhold:

"If you feel the need to constantly complain at things why don't you look at your own country and start complaining about stuff?"

Why on earth would I complain about somewhere thousands of miles and months away? 

 

"In your country (probably the United States I presume?), everytime something goes wrong you 'curse at the USA" in your head?"

Why would you assume that I have the pleasure of being from the wonderful US of A? Were I that fortunate, I absolutely would curse at it. Often. 

 

Where am I losing you on this?