Office Space

"Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work." - Albert Einstein

Since the Seoul trip and the British Embassy's rejection of my wife's visa application I've spent most of my available time during the last two weeks dealing with the fallout from this, reading laws, reading rules, talking to lawyers and a lot of other people, and generally preparing our appeal against the decision. It's a process sufficiently complex that I've taken to modelling it FreeMind.

Back in the UK I used to work from home sometimes and had a small office set up, but in Korea we aren't equipped to deal with the bureaucracy which develops from dealing with the bureaucracy of others - so as the need to print, photocopy and scan certain documents has emerged we've found ourselves begging from friends or improvising solutions at short notice. Yesterday we needed some documentation from the British Embassy, but they don't answer enquiries over the phone. Emails take "up to three weeks" to answer (or possibly longer in our experience), and if you want a question or request dealt with more quickly you have to send a fax. We tried phoning anyway but got the usual response, so part of our morning was spent going to the only local PC Bang that can print things out and then a local post office where domestic-only faxes can be sent. Because the Embassy may reply by fax (or maybe they'll post it to us postage-paid-on-delivery by the addressee which is what they've done with some other documents) we had to find a friend with a fax machine who could receive any response for us.

With finally a bit more time on our hands this weekend, we'll probably look into buying what we need, even if there's really nowhere to put any additional equipment in our one room apartment. But with a full appeals process taking several months, during which there will no doubt be an ongoing administrative requirement on our part, it increasingly looks like something which has to be done. Meanwhile, all this additional work means I've hardly studied Korean in the last two weeks and I feel my language skills are going backwards again.

Korean keywords: 관료, 아파트, 대사관

Fanalysis

Perhaps the word is finally getting out about fan death, because KBS have a story, with video, on their website calling it into question. It seems that they took healthy male volunteers - well, one presumes they volunteered (pressure in Korean companies can be extreme) - and had them sleep in a closed room. One had an air conditioning unit on all night, another a standard electric fan, and the third nothing at all. The result, no deaths, one bleary-eyed volunteer who hadn't slept very well due to the stuffiness of his room, another volunteer who'd had a very comfortable night, and the last one who'd found the conditions reasonable (they actually measured sleep efficacy but I'm not certain how). No prizes for guessing which volunteer was which.

This is not very scientific of course but they also measured the subjects' body oxygen and temperature levels and found that the oxygen didn't go to a level where it was harmful, and body temperatures didn't drop to a level where hypothermia would set in and kill the sleeping victim. If these notions sound bizarre, that's the power of Korean urban legend for you. The results:

	body oxygen	sleep efficacy	body temperature
No-fan	90%	83%	37
Electric fan	94%	85%	37
Air conditioning	94%	95%	36.3

In other words, fans don't use up the oxygen in a closed room, the air isn't sucked away from under the nose causing suffocation(!), and body temperatures don't plummet to dangerous levels. Korean Mother says she's not yet convinced, but we're going to show her the video next time she comes round to see if the KBS report can change her mind.

Of course, three people is hardly a scientific sample size, and a fairer study would no doubt involve more people, more time, and certainly more soju to accurately reflect the realities of life in Korea.

Intriguingly, I read that the notion of 'fan death' really gained traction in public mind around the time of the energy crises in the 1970s. If true, one wonders if this didn't play into the hands of a government trying to manage supply, if indeed there wasn't deeper involvement in its creation.

Korean keywords: 선풍기, 죽음, 건강, 에어컨