T/N: The slice-of-life feel due to his insights on work, make me root for the guy. Ganbatte, Yeonjun!
Even so, Yeonjun could not deny why people dismissed this work, so he had nothing to say. Even if it was unfair and infuriating and petty, as long as he was receiving a companywide bonus off the profits generated by the studio that guy belonged to, it was hard to avoid being treated like a parasite.
It was galling and annoying, but his pride had already been shattered to pieces back when he was twenty-two.
“I’m going even if you don’t say it.”
Hmph.
With a disgruntled snort as he left the meeting room, he swallowed another sigh.
When he had been at the center of attention and, in his own way, power, people tried to link themselves to him in any way they could. His looks, which he himself recognized as above average, had never once worked against him.
But once he became an ordinary employee, fell out of the powerful one’s favor, and landed in a position where he had to ask others for favors, being handsome became a flaw.
If he played the sucker, he became a guy who did not live up to his face, and if he turned down requests “without knowing his place,” he became a guy who relied on his looks and acted rude.
Whatever he did, people judged it however pleased them. If you avoid tedious things in advance, that is enough. He flatly refused the pointless ask, then returned to his desk.
If he could just hang on a little longer like this, it looked like he could go home today without overtime. Just then, as he was focusing hard to wrap up his afternoon work with a touch of tension, he heard it.
“Hello~.”
A familiar voice rang out behind him.
“Oh, Ahyeon, long time~.”
Team Lead An lifted her head first to greet the visitor, and the cheerful voice laughed as Mijin greeted her.
“Long time, what. We saw each other in the cafeteria just yesterday!”
“Oh, right, that’s true.”
“We came to borrow your hands for a bit.”
The youngest in another department, who had just graduated college and joined the company not long ago, asked Team Lead An in a friendly voice. Team Lead An glanced at Yeonjun’s monitor, checked that he had nothing urgent, then waved her hand with a joke.
“Oh dear, this is the busy season for prep, isn’t it? Take him, take him!”
“Yup! Thank you!”
It was a decision that had nothing to do with what Yeonjun wanted. Not that he had grounds to refuse anyway.
He quietly slid back his chair and stood up. Just watching someone brimming with energy made fatigue wash over him. Hopefully this would be a quick odd job.
If another department was dragging in whoever was idle to make them do it, there was no way it required any special expertise. He followed after Ahyeon without a word.
“Assistant Manager Seong, could I at least buy you a coffee on the way?”
Maybe she felt bad about dragging him off to put him straight to work, because she giggled heh-heh and tipped her head way back to look up at him as she asked. Call it consideration, or maybe some kind of compensation, but he was not particularly fond of coffee. And he was even less the type to accept something he didn’t like out of consideration so the other person would not feel awkward.
“No, I’m fine.”
Contrary to what you might expect from that fair, handsome face that looked like he could glide around charming everyone, he was taciturn and not keen on interacting with others.
He had not always been that way.
He thought of himself as having been quite sociable up through twenty-one. People did not scare him when they approached, and there was never a shortage of those who wanted to hang out with him.
Not only was being the center of attention an everyday thing, he was full of confidence that he could do anything above average.
But what about now?
To twenty-year-old Yeonjun’s eyes, the current him was just an adult growing shabby and listless day by day. And “adult” was the generous way to put it.
To kids who had just turned twenty, thirty-one would no longer be hyung but ajusshi. Avoiding his own reflection in the corridor’s glass partitions, he walked two steps behind Ahyeon.
“Okay, then I’ll grab a juice from the pantry!”
No, I don’t need juice either.
When he looked down at her with the same unchanging expression, she shouted to smooth over the awkwardness.
“I want one! Since I’m grabbing mine, you should have one too!”
In the end he did not answer and gave the faintest nod. Being young is a good thing. Not being afraid to bump into things and get bruised is a privilege only that time of life enjoys.
Left behind alone in the meeting room, he let out a short sigh and waited for her to bring the juice. With her energetic scamper, clatter, jingle, the wind chime on the meeting room door swung cheerfully and chimed.
Contrary to his wish for an on-the-dot departure, the overtime for the Event Operations Team in the Corporate Support Division ran later than expected. He had somewhat anticipated it. What awaited him in the meeting room was a mountain of boxes and grunt work an elementary schooler could do.
“From now on, put one ticket in each envelope, then check the sticker and the seal, and then stick our sticker on like this.”
Open Festa, was it? Because of the large-scale fan invitation event next quarter, the entire Corporate Support Division was in emergency mode. Having steadily grown in scale since the year before last and established itself as an annual event, Open Festa drew buzz each year with a marketplace where fans gathered to sell their own fan-made goods, a voice-actor event, a concept art exhibition and more.
They did cosplay too, he thought… He still clearly remembered spending the entire event at the entrance checking wristbands, staring holes through the wrists of incoming attendees.
They’re doing that again. Since they reportedly made a tidy sum selling official goods off it, of course they were. He organized the workflow on the table so he would not make mistakes with the slightly more complicated configuration than last year and asked,
“How many sets do we have to make in total?”
Was it around a thousand sets last year. He had heard they would scale up a bit this year, but he had not confirmed it for sure, so he asked, hoping he was wrong.
“Mm… we need to make three thousand sets first.”
“Gasp.”
He doubted his ears at the increase that blasted past his expectations.
“Sorry, what?”
“Oh, we decided to rent a separate venue this time. Since admission was by lottery, I guess quite a lot of CS came into the call center saying the number of invitees was too small.”
“Ah…”
That was fair. At a major game company counted among Korea’s leading content firms, with more than ten core IPs, if they held a lottery not just for one particular game but companywide and only a thousand people could get in, of course the competition would make people see red. It was good that they increased it… good from the user’s point of view, anyway.
For Yeonjun, who would now be ground up together in the prep, it was a disastrous decision.
“Isn’t this the sort of thing a vendor could do for us?”
As he started the work with a somewhat sour expression, his soul absent, he asked, and Ahyeon answered with the same hollow eyes,
“The vendors handling production are all different… With just three thousand sets, if we ask one to receive items made by other vendors and do the assembly, they won’t do it…”
So the company had basically settled on a strategy of “make the lowest-seniority newbie and a free rider from another department do it.”
It was a truly unpleasant decision, but he had no right of refusal. If you are getting a bonus thanks to someone else’s department, you jump when told. He briefly swallowed a sigh and set his hands moving fast.
Soon, surprised at his speed, Ahyeon kept exclaiming, “Assistant Manager, your hands are so fast, it’s like you have five of them!” but it stirred not the slightest emotion in him.
I want to go home. If I empty my brain, at least time will pass faster.
Clicking his tongue, he moved his hands like a machine.
By the time he succeeded in clocking out after finishing the packaging of admission tickets to be sent to users who had won entry to Open Festa, following Ahyeon’s lead, it was past eight.
He staggered out of the company, rode to a nearby station, then got wedged into a subway car packed solid like a slab of rice cake to a station with a cluster of relatively cheap villas and studio apartments nearby, and arrived home past nine.
At least the event team leader had ordered a light snack for dinner while they worked. If he had come home at this hour without even eating, he would have struggled to choke down dinner, then the moment he came out of the shower it would already be past ten.
As new office workers are often shocked to discover, when you do an hour or two of overtime and go home without a proper meal, you usually black out for a bit and open your eyes to find it is past ten.
Is there any need to be this exhausted after nothing more than the schedule of going to the office?
Do all office workers really live like this?
Is it even possible to enjoy a hobby while this drained?
If you grit your teeth and endure and endure again in quiet despair, you get used to this life, and instead of building stamina, since time changes nothing, you just give up.
After finally finishing a hot shower, he sprawled on the sofa for a moment, then jerked himself upright.
Not like this. I need to game.
All morning he had thought that once he got home, he would check this and that and roughly gauge what to do, but the moment he failed to leave on time he had forgotten it for a while.
First, let’s grind hard. Level up, and find something that can take Director Joo’s head off.
He recalled his goal once more.
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