liar

On Tuesday, my boss told everyone in the office that we'd all be meeting for lunch the next day. All the teachers, 20 total- 15 Korean, 5 foreigners- would meet up before work and eat. Sounds great, right? Who would ever turn down a free lunch? Well, I would.



Sure, a free lunch sounds good, but what you don't know is just how damn awkward these things are. Nobody really wants to be there. You're with the people you work with, so it feels like work before work. The foreigners all sit on once side of the table, the Koreans on the other. Since no one wants to be there, it's especially true that no one wants to talk to anyone. So for the most part people just eat in silence. Occasionally a Korean will ask a foreigner a question. "Do you like beef?" or some such trite query. "Mm, yeah. It's good," will come the response. Then another 15 minutes of silence. Then everyone leaves, but work doesn't start for another 90 minutes. So you go home or to a coffee shop for a little while and sit, until you have to go to work and you see all the same people again and it's like, "Hi again. Yeah lunch was great." Count me out.

So when my boss told everyone we were going to meet for dinner, I immediately start constructing an escape.

Now here's the thing. My boss doesn't speak a lick of English. It probably seems strange for a woman whose job is to manage an English language institute not to be able to speak English, but its really not necessary for her. She mostly deals with Korean parents and the Korean teachers. But this lady knows that I study Korean. She's seen me during my break time studying vocabulary or doing online lessons. She loves me for it. And I even get to practice Korean with her. If I have a problem or I need to tell her something, I can do it in Korean and she gets a kick out of it.

Last week, in fact, I ran into her in a hallway. At the time I had been having a toothache for a week or so, so I was kinda rubbing my jaw when she saw me because it was sore. This is a perfect opportunity to converse in Korean! She asked what was wrong and I told her I had a toothache. She said I should go to the dentist, and I told I had an appointment for the next day. All of this was true.

Fast forward to me conjuring an escape plan. It doesn't take long me for to realize that saying I have a dentist appointment will fit the bill perfectly. In fact, when I did go to the dentist last week they gave me a temporary crown, which will be replaced with a permanent crown on Friday. I can just say that my appointment, which is on Friday, is actually on Wednesday.

I'm not the best liar in the world. I don't make it a habit to tell bold-faced lies on a regular basis, and when I do I always feel that I'm acting odd as I do it, and that the listener can sense that. But anyway, when I went to my bosses office, to tell her my perfect lie about why I wouldn't be able to attend lunch the next day, well, it was the worst lie I've ever told. Lying in another language is tough. I knew exactly what to say, but as I heard the words come out of my mouth, all I could think was that this was the least convincing I've ever been. Even though my lie was perfectly reasonable, something about saying it in another language completely threw me off, and I felt completely exposed.

Thankfully I don't think she cared one way or the other about it. Hell, me not attending meant it was one less person to pay for. So it worked and I didn't have to go to lunch and instead stayed home and watched basketball with my cat.