Drinkers in Korea Dial for Designated Drivers
Seokyong Lee for The International Herald Tribune
Hur Rak checked his cellphone in Seoul, South Korea, at a waiting area
for drivers who take over the wheel for customers too inebriated to
drive.
By CHOE SANG-HUN
Published: July 10, 2007
SEOUL, South Korea
— At 6:20 p.m., a line pops up on the screen of Hur Rak’s palm-size
digital wireless device with his first order of the evening: a shoe
dealer has had too much to drink and wants to be driven home in his own
car.
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Seokyong Lee for The International Herald Tribune
Mr. Hur drove a customer’s car. Drivers, who work fast to do as many
jobs as they can in a night, are often stranded far from public
transit.
Mr. Hur rushes off into the subway and then finds his customer — and the car, a red subcompact — in less than 15 minutes.
“Speed is money in this business,” said Mr. Hur, 43, who received about $16 for driving his customer home.
“You want to get as many orders as possible before dawn breaks,” he said. “I sleep in the day, work at night, six days a week.”
Mr.
Hur is a “replacement driver” who makes his living by delivering
inebriated people and their cars home. There are tens of thousands of
them operating in this hard-drinking metropolis of 10 million people.
They go to work when Seoul’s streets blossom with neon signs and end
their shifts well after the last lights blink off in the early morning
mist curling up from the Han River.
Their work has become such an
essential part of life in Seoul and other major cities of South Korea
that the national statistical office last year began monitoring the
price of replacement driver services as an element in calculating the
benchmark consumer price index. An estimated 100,000 replacement
drivers handle 700,000 customers a day across the country, the number
increasing by 30 percent on Fridays, according to the Korea Service
Driver Society, a lobby for replacement drivers.
“The peak is
between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m.,” Mr. Hur said. “But I usually don’t get to
bed until 7 a.m. I suffer chronic fatigue, but it’s the way I make my
living.”
Mr. Hur’s service grew out of a compromise between
competing forces in Seoul: the capital’s nightlife and a police force
determined to crack down on drunken driving.
The Korean emphasis
on teamwork means frequent group dinners, and plenty of “bombs,” a
glass of beer with a shot of whiskey in it. Now, however, the police
are putting up random roadblocks to catch drunken drivers, who risk
losing their licenses. Some simply abandon their cars at the sight of a
roadblock and flee, figuring that illegal parking is a far lesser crime.
Besides
the night hours and low job status, replacement drivers have an obvious
occupational hazard: their customers, who can become abusive. There
have been reports of a replacement driver stopping in traffic, locking
the car and walking away, leaving the customer kicking and raving. “My
teenage son once asked me not to tell his friends what my job was,” Mr.
Hur said.
The most common problem, he said, is having customers
who “can’t tell north from south, east from west, in their own
neighborhood.” Then there are those who refuse to wake up. Drivers
often are forced to shuffle through the customer’s wallet to look for a
home address. (Complaints of theft are not uncommon.) Or they check a
cellphone to find a home telephone number.
“If the customer is
very drunk, I make sure I get his home number from his sober drinking
partners,” Mr. Hur said. “You can struggle with a drunken man for half
an hour, pleading and shaking him, but he wouldn’t stir, and you are
stuck with him in a forest of apartment blocks well past midnight,
wasting time that you could use to get more orders. But when his wife
comes out and says two words, ‘Wake up!’ — and I am not making this up
— he comes right around.”
Some orders take Mr. Hur outside Seoul
to places where there is no public transportation or where it has
stopped running for the night, complicating his journey back to the
capital. “You walk and run to reach a gas station or a toll gate,” he
said. “There, you hitch a ride on a truck bound for Seoul. You
constantly think how fast and cheaply you can return to Seoul to get
another order.”
He said he sometimes spent time at a 24-hour
cafe, waiting for bus service to resume at 5 a.m. “About 80 percent of
the passengers on the first bus bound for Seoul are replacement
drivers,” he said. “We recognize each other by how weary we look.”
Mr.
Hur starts his evening by traveling to an underground bookstore plaza
at the bustling Chongno subway station in central Seoul, where he waits
with a dozen other drivers to receive their companies’ orders.
When
they come, the orders usually include the customer’s cellphone number,
which Mr. Hur calls to locate him. “You take a taxi and run, only to
find that your customer had called more than one company and already
took off with the one who got to him first,” Mr. Hur said. “This is the
most frustrating. I am always in a rush.”
Many replacement
drivers are part-timers, cashiers, students or salesmen who need extra
income to pay debts. There are husbands and wives working as teams,
usually with the woman following the man in a car to pick him up after
the customer is dropped off. There are also female replacement drivers
for female customers.
Mr. Hur began working full time as a replacement driver after he went bankrupt and lost his house more than three years ago.
He
now makes a little over $2,400 a month. After paying his expenses, he
still manages to send around $1,000 a month to his wife and son, who
live with his mother in a rural town.
“Like most people, I am
doing this only temporarily until a better job comes along and helps me
get back on my feet and reunite with my family,” Mr. Hur said. “Until
that happens, I drive drunks.”
Se Ri Pak had just bogeyed the 15th hole during the first round of
this year's Kraft Nabisco Championship when Yesong Han, a 13-year-old
from Yuma, Ariz., sheepishly approached with Sharpie in one hand, golf
ball in the other.
How many people are still completely without shelter at this point is difficult to say because communication lines are down
