Seoul Man

A glimpse into my trip to Seoul, South Korea...

So I left the hotel this morning at 8:45. Got a taxi (You have a choice of White Taxi, low budget or Black Taxi, about $10 more for my ride, the Concierge said). So I get into this brand new luxury Hundai (if you can imagine a Luxury Hundai (aren’t they, like mutually exclusive?). Pretty nice ride, but the traffic is MISERABLE!!! Holy Freakin” CRAP!!! We probably went 15 miles in about an hour and a quarter.

This, as it turns out, was not that bad. My driver (more about that in a moment) dropped me off in front of the building I was going to and called the guy I was meeting so he could meet me in the lobby. Cool.

Then we started with Security, Oh……my……Gawd….! These are the most paranoid people I have ever dealt with. To start with, I had to leave my passport with the receptionist in exchange for a badge that would let me in virtually anywhere. Not too concerned with WHERE I was going, but when it came to WHAT I was carrying it was a whole different story. I had to empty my laptop bag and tool bag so three guys could pore over the contents. Any thing that could carry data – my Blackberry, memory stick, camera, etc was sealed in individual baggies and returned to me. If I opened a bag while there, its contents would be cheerfully retained by Samsung upon my departure.

My laptop had seven pieces of security tape covering every port on the machine. Lord help me if a piece of tape was missing upon checkout (that’s another ½ hour process when leaving). They would then wipe the laptop clean of data before returning it to me. Every part I brought in was cataloged with the serial number and after replacing any part the old part’s serial number, would be entered into the security log on my way out. Even cables (can’t store a lot of data in an unplugged 12 inch long cable) had to be serialized (we made some stuff up here).

The room I was working in was on the other side of a clean room, so to get there you have to remove your shoes, put on a pair of rubber sneakers w/booty tops, put on a mask, headgear, full body suit and rubber gloves, stand 2 at a time in a airlock that blows wind at you for a minute, and then walk the 25 feet past the end of the clean room to the computer area where you can take some of this stuff off. Man those Koreans have little feet!

I replaced the parts I came to replace, then tested the scanner OK. Then as I was wrapping things up, I dropped a screw and when I reached for it, touched a fuse on a board and it fell off the board.

The solder connection was so poor that it was being held on by oxidation, not solder. As it turned out, another one did the same thing. Also, somewhere down the line, because this is a one-of-a-kind Engineering machine, either when the scanner broke or when I was working on it, the glass fiber optic cables that channel light to the microscope lens, had been run over by the moving part of the machine, which destroyed them. I had to find a soldering iron and fix the board and pull the fiber optics out of another scanner to use in this one, all of which took until 6:30.

Ok, now we’re back to My Driver. Apparently I now have a driver. I told him I would probably at Samsung until 5:00, since he asked. He gave me his card and said to let him know if I needed a ride back to the hotel. At about 6PM the phone in the room I was in rings and one of the Koreans starts talking to someone and hangs up. He tells me my driver has been waiting outside and called my contact to see when I might be ready, but says not to hurry. I get out there about 6:45 and he is there waiting for me. I must have overpaid in the AM. It took 2 hours to make the return trip to the hotel! The traffic here is worse than driving in New York City by a long shot! I’m going back tomorrow and my driver is picking me up at 10AM. Apparently he’s in it for the long haul.

Honest, that’s all for now.