Mission Impossible?
I needed new shoes. Something to wear to work, on my bike, and casually. The answer: Dr. Martens. I went to the Dr. Martens outlet here in Pusan located on the first floor of “Sfunz”(pronounced “spongeeeee” by the natives) in Haeundai (pronounced “High-ooon-die” by the foreigners) and selected the perfect footwear for me. The problem was, my feet are too big. Size 12 (aka 300mm Korean and 11 English). They had one size smaller, but they were too narrow at the end. The clerk insisted that they would stretch. I disagreed that steel toed footwear would stretch very much. He agreed to order the proper size from Seoul and told me the would come on Tuesday.
Predictably, Tuesday came and went with no shoes. I called at lunchtime today and asked what was going on. After sorting through the numerous apologies, the store employee informed me that my shoes had been sent to the wrong address and maybe I could have them on Thursday.
I responded that while it was, indeed, a sad development, I had been expecting the shoes on Tuesday and could even have understood getting them today, but Thursday was unacceptable. I asked if there was any way I could get them today… The reply? “Impossible.”
“Impossible”?
“Impossible,” came the confirmation.
I pressed. “There isn’t any way to get them today?”
“No. Impossible.”
“It wasn’t impossible to deliver them to deliver them to the wrong address, but it is impossible to quickly correct the mistake,” I queried in an overly annoyed tone.
“Yes. It is difficult,” the store employee insisted.
Being the pigheaded foreigner I am, I broke all rules of polite social discourse and asked, “Is it really impossible, or it’s just difficult and you don’t want to deal with it?”
” ,” the clerk replied silently.
“Well, what can you do for me? I payed KRW 120,000 for these shoes with the understanding that they would be delivered yesterday. I don’t want to wait another day. This isn’t acceptable. Can’t you give them to a ‘quick service’ (a motorcycle messenger)?”
“Let me call you back,” the clerk said in a rather sheepishly.
4 hours later, my mobile phone rang. It was the clerk.
“Are you in your office, Mr. Harrison?”
“Yes.”
“I will be right there.”
30 minutes later, my secretary walks in and says that there is a shoe guy here for me. I greet him warmly. He removes his baseball cap and bows about 500 times apologizing profusely. I perform my social dance by apologizing for being so demanding and causing him the trouble of having to come all of the way to my office from the other side of the city.
The conclusion?
Proof that in Korea “impossible” things are seldom ever really impossible. “Impossible” usually means that something is inconvenient, somebody else’s department, or simply not something the person wants to be bothered with.
However, having my boots hand-delivered to my office by a store employee would simply not happen in the US. Korea is very good to foreigners in that way. We get a lot of special treatment that other Koreans would never in a million years get and that Americans would never extend to each other. Had I insisted on this in America, the clerk would not have said that it was “impossible,” he/she would have most likely told me in a rather impolite manner to go intercourse myself.