Gripes (III): In Search of the Comfort Zone
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Gripes
Regular readers will realise that if you are like myself and stay in the one place for a long time, you accumulate things. You arrive in a place like Korea with nothing but as your life passes onwards, your material possessions grow until there comes a point where they become a problem . . . but at the same time, you still find it difficult to find certain things . . .
Here in Miryang, the last few weeks have been exceptional for the amount of time spent not actually engaged in teaching. We have had Children's Day, Parents' Day (an optional extra kindly given to us by the principal, Mr. Pak), Sports Day, two sessions of in-service training, and this Thursday was a session of mid-term tests; yesterday (Friday), there were no lessons as the students were treated to free bouts of cheers and groans as their grades were given out and they were re-allocated to new seat numbers. The bottom line, however, is that since arriving here on April 1st, I have probably only had one full week of work.
It also proved a surprising week in one other respect: setting up regular payments between one bank account and another back in Blighty, and in the course secondly of discussing things generally, it transpired that although my VISA had been taken away from me (i.e. the bank wrote to me to say that since I was no longer resident in the UK, it could not justify the security risk of sending me a new one when the old one expired. So . . .), there was no flag on their computer system justifying this. Did I want a new one?
"No," I said: "I've had enough of credit cards, let it die a natural death!"
The other option was a debit card, which was also a part of the VISA system and could therefore be used to transmit funds globally for payments as well as being used locally to take funds from my account at an ATM. So it was that this week, two letters arrived from my bank in England, one a thin notification and the other a thick one with literature and . . . a new debit card.
But surely, you may say at this juncture, you had a debit card back in England? Well actually, yes I did, but it was chewed up by an ATM in Hsin Chuang City while I was studying Chinese in Taipei . . . that was in early 2003, shortly before I arrived here in Korea, so for about six years, this facility has been completely unavailable. When the CC was also taken away, payment of global bills became much more difficult and expensive!
So this strange preamble – although not entirely off-topic – is a sort of warning to people who commit themselves to long-term travel or residency in a country other than their own: you may lose important facilities like these, often for no good reason, and probably when you actually need them, or at any rate lose them at thoroughly inappropriate times, and if at all possible you should have some kind of contingency plan for when that happens. I didn't and in certain respects had to endure the consequences as gracefully as I could. Just imagine one possibility: a major catastrophe, or a war perhaps, raises its ugly head in your neighbourhood just as you spent all your last dosh at the pub in a major binge . . . how could you escape or even survive in such circumstances without a debit or credit card for a ticket out?
As it happens, these strange financial phenomena are not entirely unrelated to this blog's main subject: buying things in Korea. The Internet here is all very new and very high-speed, but even a registered foreigner may have problems buying things online because of a pre-existing setup which is a real pain. The difficulties you may experience are:
* the system only allows you to make online payments using Microsoft Internet Explorer (and therefore – by extension – only using Microsoft Windows);
* you may be excluded from using foreign credit cards and have to obtain something similar here – assuming that your bank allow it (some will, most won't, I am told);
* exclusion from direct payment of this kind may mean that you are forced to get a local debit card and use this at an ATM for manual transfer between numbered accounts;
* apparently, foreigner ARC registration numbers are not accepted by this system.
Thankfully, it is not all as complicated as you might think from reading the above. For example, I often buy books from a company called http://www.whatthebook.com/ in Itaewon, and paying for orders manually at the ATM proved to be a doddle; increasingly, ATMs here are being replaced with bilingual (Korean/sort-of-English) ones and this is making payments much easier, although it has to be said that it is easier with some than with others. However, you will read online that there are an increasing number of people like myself who want to do all their online doin's with anything other than Microsoft (and run headlong into an irritating experience as a result), and they recommend that you make manual payments like this. I have to agree: who, after all, wants to lose control over something like that?
The problem with Microsoft arises over something called SEED, a 128-bit encryption system set up back in the days when Microsoft was still only tooling around with 40-odd-bit encryption. Alas, this was also set in stone – or in law here, at any rate – and cannot now be changed. Meaning that by legal dictation, all electronic financial transactions here must use SEED, therefore all systems used for this must use a Microsoft OS – people like myself who prefer (say) MacOS or Linux, both of which are gaining traction here as the users wise up, are out on their digital ears – how strange that a government should disadvantage a whole nation by setting what are essentially non-competitive practices into a legal framework!
But before we set off on an anti-Microsoft vendor lock-in rant, let's remember that the government did this for good reasons. As I mentioned in earlier blog entries, this part of the world is alive with bots, malware, keyloggers, spyware, viruses, Trojans, you name it. Security is vital where electronic financial transactions are involved because once "someone" gets your details, you're fleeced. Even in big-iron financial systems running UNIX or Solaris, it is possible to hack into a system, as happened to a big bank in Japan only a short while ago. The government here did the right thing when everyone else could not see the need; the trouble now is that this is out of date and has had an unanticipated side-effect in forcing everyone to use the most prevalent (and demonstrably the least secure) platform.
This means in fact that Korea has become cut off from the other systems that are used globally. People in other countries do not need (and certainly do not want) SEED; plus, it's all in Korean anyway, so even if they install it, people in other parts of the world will mostly not understand it.
All of this stands alongside other disadvantages for foreigners wanting to do financial transactions here. For example, when my previous Boss here asked me to stay for my second year, my first thought was to buy in an English-language laptop or other system from PrimePC in Japan – until I contacted the customs people and was told that if I imported anything, I would have to pay ten per cent. Import Duty. More recently, my erstwhile noob work colleague Charlie's mother sent him a big box of goodies from North Carolina – which was inspected at the airport and one offending set of articles – believe it or not, packets of beef jerky – were removed and impounded because they could not be imported! In Korea, you can only eat Korean jerky . . .
Another disadvantage is trying to use services like PayPal. Ideally, you have a CC and PayPal essentially functions as a security wrapper for payments from your account to the recipient – as well as allowing you to pay people by directing it to their e-mail account (i.e. to the bank account of the person using that e-mail address). However, my Korea-based PayPal account can apparently only receive funds from another PayPal account or from a bank account in the US. What is the point of that, exactly?
Readers should not be disheartened by these tales of woe. Remember: living in another country is not like living at home. They have different laws and different ways of doing things; you just have to be flexible and adaptable, ask pertinent questions so that you are informed and change a little here and there to fit in better. You should also cultivate a small group of local friends who will help you when there is any difficulty, and it has to be said that this is quite often in East Asia.
Where all of this is leading to is my own desire to purchase a large-ish (but not, in truth, the most expensive) article for my little one-person apartment: a comfy chair to flop into at the end of the day. As I have grown older out here, it has also become more and more physically uncomfortable – my backside in particular finds it hard at times to remain seated on hard chairs. Similarly, bed mattresses out here can be very hard and inflexible, with particular effects on the back first thing in the morning. But do a web search here and you get an endless list of office chairs, kids chairs and even (inexplicably) women's footwear . . . it takes time and when you find what you want, you then have the additional obstacle of actually, er, paying for it. I find it interesting that things Westerners want are generally difficult to find even though importation and transport are relatively easy; given that there already exists here a burgeoning foreign-resident market for things like authentic tortilla chips, authentic beef jerky and even locally-manufactured comfy chairs, has no-one the simple wit to put it all together in one convenient package? But you can say exactly the same about the cable TV channels here, or the choice of available cars.
Anyway, I will triumph in the end; I have the right attitude and no intention of doing anything illegal or harmful. But these processes are time-consuming and presumably – rather like the change of E-2 visa regs at the end of 2007 – are subject to alteration without necessarily any fair warning. So that's the other part of adapting here, I suppose – keep your eyes and ears open, because you never know when things will come unstuck.
Now, all I have to do is get my comfy chair . . .
Andrew ^_^
Tags: banking, buying, card. bank, credit, debit, elementary, hagwon, Korea, Microsoft, paying, payment, school, SEED, South Korea
