“Yep.”
He had gotten used to eating alone with the married team lead and feeling that awkward sense of kinship.
At first, his intake cohort had stayed by his side, but once Director Joo’s blatant stink-eye began, even that had long since stopped.
Sigh… to have the kind of workplace ostracism you only see on Blind happen to me.
Worse, the reason was that he had rejected advances from a same-sex superior, so there was nowhere to tell it, no way to fix it.
“What’s good on the menu today?”
Yeonjun delegated today’s menu choice to Team Lead An, who was picking with as bright a face as possible, and he grabbed a table at the farthest corner of the company cafeteria.
While he pulled out the chair across from him and waited for Team Lead An, a sudden chill crawled up his back. Only one person in this company walked around radiating a bad omen like that.
“Assistant Manager Seong came for lunch too, huh?”
Yeonjun barely stopped his face from twisting on reflex.
Ha… there is something I want. Just one thing. If I could take this bastard’s head off, I’d die with no regrets.
He ground his teeth inwardly.
The guy had personally demoted him, then had the shameless gall to talk to him like nothing had happened. A brazen, disgusting bastard.
“Yes. Enjoy your meal.”
He turned his head with a perfunctory greeting he did not mean. It was a signal to stop talking since he had already been marked, but either Director Joo decided to ignore it, or he did not catch on. He stood there at an angle and tapped the tabletop with his fingertip.
“Mr. Yeonjun, you really are stiff. Is it pride, or should I say you lack savvy?”
Yeah, right.
Until the moment before Director Joo got his position, Yeonjun had been among the top-rated in his cohort. They said he was the first second-year assistant manager in the studio to receive an S grade just after shedding newbie status. It made sense. Back then his average schedule was repeating 10 a.m. arrival and 11 p.m. departure.
Sometimes, when they entered crunch mode ahead of a major update, he would be rooted in the office for over two weeks, and his team lead would literally push him out the door to go home.
“If I don’t catch it here, next time people might spot it on IAmGame or Inven.”
His main job was to spot, with a hawk’s eye, any conflicts, bugs, or errors before deploying developed items to the live server. His naturally insane dynamic visual acuity let him scan faster than his peers, and it shone.
Sometimes he even planned improvements himself and reported them. People said, seeing how hard he worked, that even though he was QA, he would clearly shoot upward soon.
Now that golden prospect had become an exile. All because of this Director Joo.
“Thank you for the compliment.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
Director Joo answered with a nasty sneer to Yeonjun’s icy thanks, his expression unchanged.
As if that would make anyone flinch. How long does a director last anyway? Right now, he sat atop the company’s highest-grossing department and acted like the world was his.
‘Blossoms do not last ten days’ was not a proverb that applied only to Yeonjun.
You will be removed from that director chair faster than I leave this company.
Grinding his teeth inside, he answered calmly.
“Do you have anything else to say?”
If not, get lost.
Director Joo’s creased brow twitched as he opened his mouth.
“That is what I meant by lacking savvy.”
Just as he was about to spit out something more obnoxious, Team Lead An strode up to the table with two trays in both hands and greeted them with a bright, puzzled face.
“Oh my, Director Joo. Goodness, goodness, goodness. Long time no see. Why have you been so hard to spot lately? My, our Director Joo hit forty and is a full-blown ajusshi now, hehe.”
Thud.
As the trays she brought landed on the table, an endless stream of ridiculously gushy greetings poured out of Team Lead An as if a soundtrack had started to play.
“When are we, the aunties and uncles, going to get together, huh? Getting older is sorrow enough, we should hang out with our own kind.”
“Ha, no… Team Lead An.”
“Hohoho, don’t dodge. You wouldn’t ignore your cohort now that you are successful, would you?”
When Team Lead An patted Director Joo’s shoulder with little pops, his face darkened blatantly and he began backing away.
Enjoying the bafflement washing over his face, Yeonjun gave a satisfied little snort and turned his head.
“Oh, don’t be like that. If we get a chance next time, I’ll treat.”
Perhaps because her raucous welcome landed dead center.
“Well, this is around when my guys call me, so I’ll be off…”
As Director Joo tucked his tail and fled, Team Lead An sat down, the corners of her mouth, which had been soaring to the sky, dropping coldly.
“That slippery, snake of a man, tsk.”
At her instant change in tone, Yeonjun let out an involuntary chuckle.
He had known that Team Lead An and Director Joo had similar start years, but he had not known they were cohort peers.
Thinking about it, there was no way Director Joo would not rub wrong to Team Lead An, who had fallen out of favor with higher-ups and been pushed completely off the fast track.
Yeonjun cleared his throat with a brief ahem.
“Thank you.”
Although she was generally outgoing, Team Lead An was not the type to overreact for someone else like that. Knowing full well she had shooed him off on purpose after seeing Yeonjun in a bind, he was not shameless enough to let it pass without thanks.
“What for? I wasn’t eager to see his face either. One thing I do like about getting older is that my skin has gotten thicker. Before I got married, I never imagined I would be like this.”
With that, their entirely ordinary, not-particularly-close lunch began, and Yeonjun quietly cleared his tray.
Today’s Western-style menu was a step up from school lunches, cream pasta and fish cutlet, plus dessert cake. For all the complaints one could levy, if you excluded work matters, the company benefits were top-tier. After finishing, he swallowed a short sigh and headed back to the office.
On the way from the cafeteria toward the elevators, he glanced at Director Joo leading his old colleagues in a laughter-induced coffee time in the company café.
His eyes narrowed on their own and the corner of his mouth twitched with spite. He took a deep breath inward.
Think rationally. When my whole family was in a quagmire, I wanted to jump, but now I want to shove Director Joo out the window.
Broadly speaking, that is progress of a sort. Giving himself that non-comfort of a comfort, he clicked his tongue and returned to his seat. After finishing replies to the same old, trivial, unfixable inquiries, he saw a new mail alert pop up in the company system app and hurried into his inbox.
[Inbox (1)]
[Management Division / May Payroll Statement]
At the heart-pounding subject line, he quickly entered the security code and opened the file. The base salary and team bonus were, as always, amounts that left his heart feeling empty, but the companywide bonus once again warmed his heart.
Maybe… collective production and collective distribution is not such a bad idea… He forcibly pushed away the ideologically suspect thought.
“Sigh…”
No matter how shitty the work, no matter how much that shitty Director Joo harassed him…
As if I would resign. I would sooner shove him out the window. If I want to endure here more stably, the only way is to take Director Joo’s head off.
He briefly thought that he should log into Erha Online after work, then, with his revived company spirit, he focused on his afternoon tasks.
While he was reusing files from an old event to prepare a mini time event for next week, he looked up from the file when, a little later, a cohort now in another department sent him a content-less ping.
[Jeong Gwang-il] Step out of the office for a sec 4:23 p.m.
Leaving Studio Snow’s office, which was separated into a small room like a place of exile, he found a narrow hallway. It was not a space fit for a conversation.
“Hey, over here, let’s talk for a moment.”
His cohort, who had joined around the same time and been assigned to Studio Cloud, where he had settled steadily without much drama, abruptly opened the door to a random nearby conference room.
“What if someone reserved it?”
“It’s fine, we’ll only use it a moment.”
What on earth is he going to say, calling me with that serious face?
Unable to hide a bad feeling about whatever it was, Yeonjun looked at his cohort.
“You really not interested in clubs? Our club is recruiting new members.”
He had half expected to hear some big inside scoop, but it was the same pointless recruiting attempt as always. He frowned and refused flatly.
“I said I’m not interested. I don’t have time for that.”
“What’s so hard about going bowling once a month. You can just show up when the small group meets.”
From the very start, he had known why this coworker who was no help to his life at the company was trying to rope him in. With the conversion of this year’s open recruitment approaching, he wanted to use Yeonjun as bait to hook new hires who could join the club.
“I really don’t have the bandwidth. I’m busy, so I’m going back.”
“Oh, like you have so much to do. Who could stop someone so fancy? Go on, go.”
At the unthinking truth that slipped out of his cohort’s mouth, Yeonjun’s eyebrow twitched. Naturally he was offended.
Did I ask to be placed in this department? Or did I get kicked out for poor performance?
He had more confidence in his job skills than anyone, and even now, though it was scut work, it was not like he was not working. If anything, he was suffering under tasks so minor and trivial that they could not be automated and had to be handled by human hands.
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