Heat, and Other Things I Miss Having at Work

It never occurred to me before moving here that I would work in a place that doesn’t want to spend money on heating, so just doesn’t. You can’t allow your employees to freeze in America. Here, there’s not much in the way of worker’s rights or unions, so many places cut as many corners as they can. This translates for most that the heaters are turned down as low as possible.

In fact, I usually see the lobby heater (at one school) set to around 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit). The other day I saw it go as high as 19C (66.2F) before it was lowered. Yesterday, for most of the day it was around 9C (48.2F). I understand not wanting to spend the gas and electricity to run it on high constantly, but here’s an option: run it on a decent temperature for a short bit to get it warm, turn it off, and turn it on again when it has cooled down too much. I think the same amount (or more) of gas and electricity was used by having it run all the time, and we were downright frigid all day. I mean, honestly, what’s the point of having your heater set on 9-19C (48-66F)? I have to go outside and start walking home to defrost my feet.

I should mention at this point that Korean buildings don’t have central heating like we do in America. Homes here have Ondol heating, which is basically a series of pipes running under the floor, which contain water that is heated when you turn the gas on. The floor gets warm, and eventually the entire room gets warm. This is why traditionally Koreans (and other Asian countries) use short tables and sit on the floor. It’s to keep warm! They don’t use carpet here either, because with the Ondol system, the carpet would actually be a barrier to the heat coming to you. In many Korean businesses, however, no heating system is in place at all. When a business rents an office or floor of a building, they are responsible for buying a heater (or heaters) for that space, as well as paying for the gas and electricity used to run them.

In my schools, there are individual heaters in each classroom, and one central heater in the lobby. At the school with the lobby heater issues, the teacher’s room has no heater at all, but can sometimes feel a slight breeze from the lobby; the other school has a heater that tends to blow only lukewarm air. However, because of the tendency to try to cut costs as much as possible, if the heaters in the classrooms aren’t working, no one’s in any hurry to fix them. The students and teachers alike are used to wearing many layers of clothing and their coats the whole time they’re at school. I’m not. I find this unusual.

I’ve found also that there is usually only one bathroom on each floor, which is shared by all the businesses on that floor. In one of my schools, the bathroom is for females only, so the boys must go up to the floor above if they need a toilet. (Or outside, which is too often chosen, by men of all ages and levels of sobriety.) There are rarely restrooms in individual shops unless they are restaurants or bars, and even then they are often shared with the place next door.

Bathrooms are usually not heated, not do they have hot running water for hand-washing. I’m learned to use the term “restroom” less, and have started calling it simply “the toilet”. These are not places where you would want to rest. You get somewhat used to making the shortest possible bathroom breaks, so not to freeze to death, but washing your hands in frigid water when it’s zero degrees Celsius outside and 15 degrees Celsius inside is just brutal.


***Follow up:***
The heater went down to -2 the other day. Seriously, why does a heater even have that setting? What’s the point of “heating” a room to less than freezing? At that point, I was being refrigerated.