| Episode 167. On-Site Work (1)
After the casting for *In My Office* was announced, articles poured in from every direction.
≫ Spark Iwol: “Now I Want to Act”…… A New Challenge
≫ Strike While the Iron Is Hot—“Spark Iwol to Appear in *In My Office*”
≫ “I Want to Show You a More Mature Side of Myself……” Spark Iwol’s Unusual Transformation
Half of them were articles taking veiled shots at me. Since I had been a hot topic until recently, they couldn’t openly write something like, “Kim Iwol, the Next Idol with Terrible Acting?” But it seemed there was still a negative perception of idols pursuing acting careers.
Lee Cheonghyeon, who had been skimming the headlines beside me, said,
“People must not know how good you are at acting, hyung. You’re basically the king of acting.”
“Me?”
I hadn’t even received the script yet, nor had I shown anyone my audition performance separately, but Lee Cheonghyeon was certain of it.
When I questioned him, Lee Cheonghyeon nodded and said,
“You’re good at acting, hyung. That…… acting where you answer energetically, as if you’re going to put your heart and soul into it, even though you think they’re making you do every shitty task under the sun.”
“Cheonghyeon, how about we have our first conflict at the dorm and then spend a little time airing the episode about Spark’s internal division during a livestream?”
“You can’t say I’m wrong, can you? I saw straight through your heart, didn’t I?”
He had seen through it so precisely that it felt like he’d punched a hole straight through my chest. I had definitely raised him wrong. Either that, or the little bastard had secretly learned something strange somewhere.
Lee Cheonghyeon snickered and ran away. A sigh rose from the depths of my dantian.
‘I should probably have the basic framework for the fan song lyrics ready before the script arrives.’
I opened my diary, which was as precious to me as my life. This month’s schedule was packed as well.
There was a local festival on the calendar, and they said we were going on *Do.Life* again……
Wait.
‘*Do.Life*?’
“Seongbin, did we have something scheduled for *Do.Life* this month?”
“I only heard that it was sometime this month. They said the recording date hadn’t been set yet…….”
“That would be today! How have you all been, Spark?”
“Waaah!”
Before Jeong Seongbin had even finished speaking, the production staff flung open the practice-room door and streamed inside. They were practically a tidal wave.
More importantly, it was ten at night.
They wouldn’t be coming for a meeting at this hour, so……
“Don’t tell me we’re leaving right now?”
“As expected of Iwol. Look at how quick you are to catch on.”
“Right now?”
Kang Giyeon’s eyes widened.
“W-We look like a mess right now.”
Park Joo-woo’s voice was plaintive. The fact that we had only done vocal training instead of dance practice beforehand, so we didn’t smell sweaty, was the one stroke of luck.
“It’s fine. We’ll all be a complete mess once we get there anyway.”
Even in the midst of all this, the PD smiled amiably as he spoke.
But PD, a pearl still shines even when buried in mud, whereas a barnacle is still just a barnacle, even after you scrape it off.
A barnacle like me needs time to prepare myself mentally, is what I’m saying.
“Is there somewhere we need to leave for at this hour?”
I could understand why Choi Jeho was bewildered. If we left now, we could reach just about anywhere in South Korea before sunrise.
What kind of work was usually done at night?
The environmental-cleanup episode had already aired. Were we going to maintain railway tracks? Or, as an extension of the café episode, work the night shift at a PC bang?
Even as I racked my brain, I hurriedly pulled a pouch from my bag.
Then I promptly gave Park Joo-woo some motion-sickness medicine.
“This is definitely a long-distance trip. Take it quickly.”
“Mm-hmm…….”
Park Joo-woo swallowed the motion-sickness pills with loud gulps, as if drinking water of life. He seemed to sense a threat to his very existence as well.
“All right, all right, Spark! We have a long way to go! Let’s get moving!”
“Yes!”
We piled into the van with military precision. Cameras had been installed here and there inside it as well—who knew when they’d put them in?
“What are we going to do when we get there?”
Kang Giyeon asked as he fastened his seat belt.
“When I look at my mom, she stays in the lab until late at night if she can’t get the experimental results.”
“Would there be anything we could help with in a lab?”
For once, Choi Jeho said something reasonable. None of us even had graduate degrees, let alone doctorates—actually, one of us didn’t even have a bachelor’s degree anymore—so what could we possibly do?
“Could it be squid fishing?”
“That sounds plausible……!”
Kang Giyeon offered his own guess. It was fairly convincing, but Jeong Seongbin countered,
“Then shouldn’t we have left earlier? We’d have to go all the way to Ulleungdo. It’s the tail end of the season now.”
“How do you know when squid season is, hyung?”
“I saw it on the news.”
The news anchor probably hadn’t imagined that an idol would be watching an article about squid season so attentively.
While we wracked our brains, the van sped south.
A job that had to be done from morning or dawn in the southern region on an autumn day without much wind.
A job where appearances weren’t important, so we wouldn’t need makeup; difficult enough to satisfy the viewers, yet simple enough for children to do; work that required nothing but manpower.
And one that required us to go out at night despite having to endure an environment too dark to illuminate properly.
Put another way, a job that required us to arrive according to a particular “time”……
“It’s a mudflat.”
“Huh?”
We’re on our way to a mudflat, you idiots!
* * *
After driving for a long while, the van arrived in Mokpo. It was pitch-black in every direction. The salty scent of the sea hung in the air.
As we climbed out of the van one by one, the PD approached us.
“I heard you figured out where you were going halfway through?”
“Yes, Iwol hyung…….”
“The audio director was horrified because no one slept the entire way. It was a long trip—you should’ve gotten some sleep.”
Spark has an ironclad rule that we must never sleep wherever there are cameras. Unless it’s an unavoidable circumstance—motion sickness, injury, sudden indigestion, or a twenty-four-hour schedule without sleep—we have to stay alert and in our right minds.
“The driver didn’t even enter the destination into the navigation system. How did you figure it out? Don’t tell me the script was leaked?”
“Haha, I wonder.”
My lips were smiling, but my heart was crying. There was no filming location with worse cost-effectiveness than a mudflat.
Work on a mudflat was inversely proportional in intensity and quantity. Aside from the amusing scenes of people falling over a few times at the beginning, it was difficult to get much entertainment out of it, while the mud inevitably slowed down the pace of the work.
There was only one thing Spark could gain from this shoot: a full-body natural mud pack.
‘They must’ve put a group in this because filming it with ordinary cast members would obviously turn it into a documentary.’
I arranged myself under the lights while lamenting inwardly.
Once the set was ready, the PD began the broadcast.
“So? Do you have any idea what kind of work you’ll be doing today?”
“Digging for cockles……?”
Park Joo-woo tentatively tried to guess the answer.
“I saw something like that on MeTube. Cleaning barnacles!”
“What’s that?”
“You use a high-pressure hose to remove barnacles that have grown on the bottom of ships. You lift the ship up and then…….”
Lee Cheonghyeon enthusiastically explained barnacle cleaning. It didn’t look easy in the slightest.
‘More importantly, they wouldn’t give amateurs a job involving something like a high-pressure hose.’
Regardless of the difficulty, it was directly connected to safety. The *Do.Life* production crew wasn’t the kind of team that would fail to regulate things to that extent.
“Ah, it feels so satisfying that you haven’t gotten the answer yet. It was worth agonizing over the item.”
The PD smiled with satisfaction as he watched us flounder without managing to guess the answer.
“Last time, Spark prepared for the part-time job far too easily. So this time, our writers gritted their teeth and searched for an item.”
‘The people on *Do.Life* must really hate losing.’ That had to be why they had dragged us all the way to Mokpo at one in the morning.
“Today, Spark’s one-day job is…… catching mudflat octopuses!”
It wasn’t an item we commonly heard about beforehand.
A task that was difficult to prepare for in advance.
A specialty whose outcome—whether we could achieve anything at all—could only be determined once we tried it.
Perfect. Which was why my future had suddenly gone dark.
Spark aspired to be a group of handsome idols who looked perfectly put together and worked so spectacularly well that no one could find anything to pick a fight over!
“But it doesn’t look like the tide has gone out yet?”
Choi Jeho pointed toward the sea as he asked. Sure enough, the water’s surface was visible not far away.
“We’ll be taking a boat from here.”
“A boat?”
“I heard octopuses don’t live near the shore.”
At the same time, papers for boarding were placed in our hands. Once we filled out the forms, each of us received a plastic bag.
“There are work clothes, gloves, and everything else inside. You can change on the boat. Just put them on over what you’re wearing now!”
“Wow, these are our first matching outfits since our practice clothes!”
Lee Cheonghyeon was delighted. He was probably taking a veiled jab at the day we had suggested buying practice clothes as our first friendship item.
Since we had to match the tide, boarding proceeded in a flash.
Seeing us wearing layers of gloves inside the boat was quite a fresh sight. At the very least, it was an image I had never seen from Spark before.
“Joo-woo hyung, are you all right with the seasickness?”
“Yeah, I’m still fine.”
“Giyeon, your shoulder strap’s twisted.”
“Thank you.”
It was nice seeing them take such meticulous care of one another as well.
Until the boat reached its destination, we went over our goal for the day again.
“The PD said how many each of us had to catch?”
“Wasn’t it ten?”
“Is ten actually doable? I’ve never caught one before, so I have no idea.”
Jeong Seongbin, Kang Giyeon, and Lee Cheonghyeon put their heads together and debated the topic, “Can Spark catch sixty octopuses in a single day?”
Choi Jeho was sitting with his back pressed firmly against the wall, watching the proceedings while drinking a cup of instant coffee prepared by one of the sailors. That guy would probably adapt and survive just fine no matter where you threw him.
As we sat together in the cramped space, chatting about this and that, we heard the sound of the boat anchoring.
Then, after waiting for the captain’s instructions, the tide gradually receded, revealing a vast mudflat.
“Spark, please get off the boat now! The mud is extremely deep, so watch your step!”
No sooner had the PD finished speaking than we heard a loud cry beside us. Choi Jeho’s right leg had sunk into the muck all the way to his knee.
“You’ll be catching octopuses here for two hours today. To catch octopuses, you’ll need tools, right?”
At that moment, a staff member tossed something down from the boat, as if throwing it onto the mudflat.
Six large baskets woven from something like straw, presumably for holding the octopuses, and……
‘Shovels?’
……six shovels. Their blades and handles were both extraordinarily long.
Strange. When I’d looked it up online, people had been digging for shellfish with little trowels. Were the tools different for a mudflat experience and a real mudflat?
The PD didn’t care whether my pupils were shaking. Instead, he called one of the sailors over to stand beside him and said,
“Then, before we get into the serious shoveling…… I mean, octopus catching! Let’s watch a demonstration from an experienced professional!”
I heard that loud and clear just now.
That man definitely said “shoveling”!