Misaeng Ep 1 Recap

"Misaeng is a highly realistic, depressing drama without any tragic happening."

It details the ups and downs in a person's work life. From dealing with discrimination of academic background and sexism to navigating company policies and bosses who have frequent power trips and who only care for their own promotion.

Main Character

• Jang Geu Rae: former Go player trained since young, he excelled at the game but had to quit due to his father's untimely death. Since then, he worked various minimum wage jobs (supermarket clerk, cleaning the sauna, cab driving for drunk people, food delivery). His mom got him an internship at an international company thanks to connection. Upon knowing Geu Rae only had a GED, all the other interns shunned him and his superiors did not expect much from him.

Difficulties Geu Rae faced in ep 1

• Ill-fitted suit. He had to wear his father's old suit. His mom tried to save to get him a more decent one.
• Assigned to Team 3 Sales, met Assistant Manager of team 3 (Dongshik) who asked him what he'd done in his 26 years of life without attaining any diploma or competency. Geu Rae stayed silent.
• A.M. Dongshik was busy with phone calls and documents while Geu Rae awkwardly sat down then stood up and walked around not knowing what to do.
• Finally given the task of photocopying some documents, he mistook the scanner for the photocopier.
• Copier ran out of paper. The drawer was also out of paper. Not knowing what was where. Not knowing how to load paper or copy multiple pages at a time. Dropped tons of paper to the floor.
• Picked up phone call asking to speak to Manager and he had no idea who he was, where he was and when he would come back, because nobody told him (no orientation or training, Geu Rae started 10 days later than other interns).
• Picked up phone call in Russian and couldn't respond. Picked up another phone call in English and didn't understand. And on. Luckily, another intern was nearby and he had to bother her again and again with those phone calls.

New characters

• Ace Intern, Ahn Young Yi, who was admired by everyone and could speak English and Russian perfectly. She had to come back and forth between her own duties and answering phone calls for Geu Rae. Finally fed up, she told him to tell anyone calling that none of his team was present and to write down a note. If foreigners called, simply hang up. When Geu Rae approached her again (to give back the hair tie she dropped), she mistook it as an invite to lunch, and before he could speak promptly told him she usually ate alone. Later, though, she walked by his desk and asked why he didn't go to lunch, then asked if he was a mama boy who couldn't do anything by himself. Geu Rae then answered "I'm not stupid", it was only because he was not hungry. But then his stomach growled loudly and Young Yi simply walked away.
• Jang Baek Gi, who seemed to be an over-achiever, perfectionist and ambitious intern. He paid attention to things like unique fonts and format, and anticipated all of his superiors' needs like bringing coffee and reserving restaurants before asked, greatly impressing them. Everyone was gossiping about Geu Rae the new intern who got in through nepotism, and Baek Gi listened with interest but with a neutral hard to decipher expression. He then introduced himself and shook Geu Rae's hand with a polite smile, offering to help when needed with things like photocopying and commenting that Geu Rae could make himself comfortable like everyone else and take off his blazer.

Social life woe

• Geu Rae tried to take the elevator to go to the cafeteria, but it was pack full of other interns. One nicely invited him in to a small space left, but another blocked him and said it was full.
• Baek Gi was in the middle of the interns and looked at Geu Rae expressionlessly as the elevator door closed. Other interns smiled politely, but soon gossiped about his special treatment as he didn't take the intern test. They wondered if Geu Rae went to Ivy League or Harvard to have that special treatment.
• The interns ate together and were complaining about the unfair competition as Geu Rae passed by with his lunch tray. To the others' dismay, Baek Gi invited him to the table. Baek Gi then asked Geu Rae to join the interns' study group. It was clear at this point that Baek Gi's "nice" intention was to expose Geu Rae's academic background to the others as they started to ask what university he came from, and he told him he only had a GED. Everyone's faces turned stone cold.
• Young Yi arrived late at the cafeteria and joined Geu Rae as he sat and ate alone while the other guys already left. She apologized for being rude earlier (calling him mama's boy) and Geu Rae replied with "yeah" instead of "it's ok", which stunned her.
• Later during the day Geu Rae happened to hear the interns gossiping about him with the Assistant Manager of the Resource team (where Baek Gi was assigned). Baek Gi listened quietly as everyone complained. The Assistant Manager told them to be nice to Geu Rae since he wouldn't last long anyway.
• Geu Rae walked home silently thinking about all the talk he overheard. He blankly looked around his room, then picked up his Go pieces and threw them into the drawer, remembering his past when while praised for having exceptional talent, he kept failing to become a professional Go player because he was distracted with part-time jobs to support his family because his dad was ill.
• Flashback to when he was stocking goods in a grocery store when he received a call from mom, and the scene switched to him kneeling silently at his father's funeral while his mom cried audibly. Geu Rae quietly thought to himself: "My journey... ends here." Still, he blamed himself for not having enough effort.

Geu Rae's solution

• Geu Rae arrived early at work and saw a list of names and contact infos. He soon memorized them and was able to quickly make calls on Assistant Manager's demand, which stunned him.
• As team 3's Manager just returned from a business trip with bloodshot eyes and was still stuck in traffic and the A.Manager had to go on a trip of his own, Geu Rae was sent to meet a foreign client. The A.M. thought their team was doomed because "this kid doesn't know anything"
• Manager arrived at the cafe to see the client happy and occupied because Geu Rae taught him to play Go during the wait.
• Still, Manager told Geu Rae he couldn't accept him because of poor qualification. Geu Rae said he was a hard worker upon being asked to sell himself. Manager said it wasn't enough. Geu Rae said his work had better quality... and quantity (didn't know what else to say). Manager gave him a task of classifying documents to test his work quality.
• Geu Rae used his childhood method of classifying Go articles to classify the documents Manager gave him.
• Meanwhile, Geu Rae's mom spent a fortune of her savings on buying him a nice suit. She immediately went to meet him in his company lobby.
• Geu Rae put on his new suit in the washroom and sniffed back his tears with a smile.
• Manager saw Geu Rae's work on classifying different files into folders and asked if he had friends. 
• Manager also walked by Young Yi's department (textile) earlier and eagerly asked her to work for his team after internship.

Day 2 problem

• At a factory, squids were mixed up with baby octopus and thus would cause quality problem for their dry products.
• Interns were assembled to go to the factory and manually separate the baby octopus from the squids. They complained that this was dirty work and that someone else should do it, while eyeing Geu Rae, who was sitting in the same room with his new suit.
• (In)conveniently, there was no protective factory clothing left for Geu Rae to cover himself, so he went into a freezing truck of seafood with his new suit. No intern wanted to partner with him either.
• Despite being portrayed as having taken numerous part-time job, Geu Rae seemed slow. Viewers pointed out that he could've asked for trash bag/plastic bag to make a poncho and cover himself.
• Geu Rae managed to find an octopus in a container as his phone rang. His gloved hand slipped and dropped the phone into the container of squid and liquid.
• Baek Gi then got a phone call and was told that the Chinese exporter accepted their fault and that the interns no longer had to separate octopus and squid. Slyly he told another intern who clearly hated Geu Rae to inform Geu Rae to stop working and come back with them. Asshole interns left after making a faint call to Geu Rae which he couldn't hear while still working hard with the squid container.
• Geu Rae stayed in the truck late until the factory worker came to tell him the others all left. He came back to the office drenched in squid juice. All the workers already left since it was late, but Young Yi was just leaving. She gave him her phone to speak to the other interns who were relaxing at a Korean sauna. They asked why he didn't pick up his phones, laughs audible in the background.
• Still Geu Rae came to the afterwork dinner and met the other interns without washing. He stood stoically while they made fun of him and his smell. Then told Manager he was going to return to the office to finish the classifying work he received. He walked away telling himself, "I'm abandoned because I don't work hard enough."

Thoughts

People like the interns are everywhere. One could say that it's almost normal, as heartbreaking as it is. Once when I came to a restaurant asking for work, I was given a trial shift. A waitress was told to show me what to do. She told me to clean the toilet with only my hands and gloves and said that was how they did it there. Then when I asked her about dining table numbers she told me there was no number. It came back to bite her in the ass when I directly asked the boss if there was really no numbers for tables, which was fucking impossible. I bussed tables before. Then, the boss hired me and let someone else trained me. They were full of praise, to my surprise. 

Being played like that was my biggest fear. In my first job when I bussed tables the boss constantly told me to come on days when the restaurant was closed. To be fair, it was holidays but I was oblivious and didn't check the calendar. I came to be a paranoid person, always afraid of being played, which was why I dealt a little better with the waitress bitch. Still, I constantly was called naive and not aware whenever I was played. The truth was, I was completely aware, but I started to "kill them with kindness." For a while, I got everyone to reciprocate, begrudgingly or not, and I usually indirectly expose their deeds in front of others. But my social capacity had its limit and soon weirder problems arose like someone thought I was a manipulative user. It was unintentional and I genuinely liked him, but due to the misunderstanding I was uncomfortable and quit after working for about half a year. My chronic pain also caused underperformance, but it's something I can never explain to anyone.