Day Four: The Voice of God Speaks Again
Jenny, who has the terrible job of delivering more or less only bad news passed down by the Ministry of Health over the P.A. system just came on to announce the following:
- The Ministry of Health has said it is very disappointed with our attitude about the quarantine.
- We should stay to our rooms 24/7 and always wear our masks in our rooms as well.
- We should minimize contact to no less than 2 meters apart.
- If we want to talk to each other, we should use the room to room telephone service.
I really do feel sorry for Jenny. She more or less got the job of politely herding cats and she does it with such an awesome attitude and cheer. Do I think people are going to stick to their rooms for the next 6 days? I’d say it has about as good a chance as Korea giving Dokdo to Japan and saying: “Our bad, those rocks are your property.”
Like I mentioned to the head of our quarantine situation when we first got here. He should take a look at what happened in Hong Kong earlier this year and how they handled the quarantine at the hotel. But this being Korea and Korea being a fly-by-the-seat-of-its-pants country they’ll do their own thing in their own way. Plus, I’d hate to be in the room when they have that conversation:
Top Quarantine Dude: “So we should copy what the Chinese did in Hong Kong, that seemed to work pretty well.”
Head of the Ministry of Health: “Copy the Chinese? HAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAHA!”
I think they’re still having trouble understanding why we aren’t all exactly thrilled to be good little Confucian automatons and return to our Stasis Chambers and Power Down for until we receive further Directives.
A guy walked by earlier and told a few of us sitting out in the foyer that we needed to return to our rooms. We said: “Yes, but we can’t get internet in the rooms. Could you set it up? Until then, we’re coming out.” The look on his face was more or less: Does Not Compute. Error. Error. Attempting to Reload. ”You need go back to room.”
I felt sorry for him. You could see the gears clicking in his head and a bit of smoke fuming from an overloaded processing unit. Here he’s got tough job dealing with infectious dirty foreigners and they operate outside the boundries of his programming. I think he shuffled off back to the Main Terminal in order to download more advanced Interaction Modules to his CPU. That, or he’s probably downstairs rethinking why he listened to his parents and went into medicine when he really wanted to be a dancer!
Heck, with the change of plans constantly, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear they start giving us kimchi based masks because, after all, kimchi can cure bird flu!
I sound like I’m starting to get bitter. I should imagine all the awesome things awaiting us on the outside. The Tancheon River! Norebangs! A beautiful Korean summer! Listening to my students attempt to sing: “I want nobody nobody but YOU!”
Incidentally, from what I heard last night people got a little rowdy around the wee hours, singing songs off the balconies and howling like wolves at the break of dawn. I wish I had been awake to hear it, but I’m glad I got the first night of good rest in the last 5 days. If people were singing off the balconies than I have to imagine somewhere in this building there’s an empty bottle of soju that’s feeling used and abused.
