2021년 11월 21일 일요일 – Mountain View 생활 6주차

English Diary

I decided to write my diary only in English from this week. I planned it for next year, but I thought it would be better to stop procrastinating.

Grammarly

It is somewhat scary to show my poor writing skill online. Also, writing without correction won’t be much helpful for improving my writing skill. Due to the reasons, I subscribed to Grammarly, which provides an AI-based writing correction service. It seems to catch incorrect words and grammar issues and provides appropriate substitutions. The best functionality of the service is that it shows synonyms for selected phrases.

Media discovery

It is tough to stop watching Korean youtube channels and move to English channels. Even though they provide English subtitles, most of them are not my taste and are boring. When I was working on Search, we always discussed the first-time-user-journey. I’m precisely a first-time user, and I don’t know how to discover my style TV shows. I just have subscribed to HBO max to see some comedy shows.

Barbershop

My hair has grown out so fast for the last five weeks. It gets too hard to dry long hair, and I googled barbershop near my apartment. The price for man’s cuts was high compared to South Korea. It was almost $60. If I was in Korea, I could go to a really decent hair shop.

The stylist was very friendly, but they weren’t professional at all. Maybe they haven’t met Asian customers before. I think the cheapest hair salon in Korea would be better than here. It is what it is. I’ll go to a Korean hair salon next time.

Mattress

Finally, my mattress has arrived on Tuesday. It is 90lbs (40kg), and FedEx put it down at the front door. They rolled it up to downsize, and it looked like a giant pillar. It took more than 2hrs to unpack and locate it on the frame. Now, it is all set for my apartment.

Volvo

Volvo is now available for test driving! When I ordered it last week, they said it would be ready next week. But yesterday, they contacted me for the appointment, and I scheduled it for Sunday.

Because it was a holiday, Carmax was super crowded, and we should wait for 30 mins. While waiting for staff, we walked around the parking lot and saw a lot of cars. Electric cars were scarce and expensive compared to others.

Test driving was pleasant a lot, and I paid directly on-site. However, the journey home was horrible since its built-in navigation system was poor. I haven’t brought a USB cable, and I couldn’t use CarPlay. Hopefully, I could arrive home after missing some exits.

Korean Police

The voice of citizens criticizing Korean Police got louder as their irresponsible behaviors in the crime scene were known. Especially, people are angry at the woman police officer who left the building while someone was under attack. In addition to this case, people are sharing videos and photos about similar situations on the Internet.

I’m sorry about the situation personally. However, I think that kind of situation would occur again and again until the root problem is resolved.

There are two main problems with the situation. The first one is that too many restrictions are forced on the police officer. Even though the Police is a law enforcement organization, the chief of the organization and politicians have been trying to make it friendly and less powerful. It took away a lot of ways to cope with criminals and prevent crime.

I strongly assume that it wouldn’t happen if the police officer never hesitated to shoot. However, gun-shot is almost impossible in Korea. Most of them aren’t familiar with shooting in the actual situation. The shooting test score is used just for promotion, and its usefulness isn’t considered at all. As I remember, the former chief of the Police withdrew his saying, which advocates using a gun in the scene after being criticized by politicians.

The second problem is the low bar of physical examination. The news said that the current hiring bar for women police officers fits elementary schoolboys. No one would agree that they can do their role in an urgent situation. Nevertheless, different hiring bar is applied depending on gender.

I think people should focus on the system. The terrible operating and hiring system makes police officers weak and irresponsible. If it is essential to prevent this disaster from happening again, we should gather our voice toward the system.