Salesmen in the Schools

I'm always surprised surprised to see random salesmen making the rounds through the school office. It's just not the way things are done in the US, letting random people with products or suitcases walk around schools uninvited, but I guess it happens here on a fairly regular basis. At least I think that's what they are. I can't think what else they'd be doing. The ones that leave samples of nutrition drinks, etc. aren't entirely unwelcome of course. Students seem to get little items as promotional goods as well sometimes; one day I came into class and nearly all my students had notepads that looked like cellphones. My co-teacher said people had been distributing them to the students outside of school earlier in the day.

One time, we had a salesman walk into our faculty lunch room. He started giving a presentation on some product or other, shouting his routine at us loudly and dropping piles of fliers on our cafeteria tables. My co-teachers and I exchanged exasperated looks and ate in silence until he finally went away.

Today though, I was the one doing the surprising! I was bent over my computer, engrossed in reading Waygook.org teaching posts, and the salesman came up behind me starting to talk. Apparently, I look rather Korean from the back: small stature, dark hair, light complexion... As he started waving his product folder at me, I looked up to see who was trying to address me and gave him quite a shock! He scrambled to recover himself, "Oh, hello good day! Sorry, sorry, English... didn't see. Korean, Korean look, sorry!" and he scurried off to talk to the next Korean teacher nearby as quickly as possible. I felt bad for him, but it was pretty amusing also.