Assistant Manager Kim Hates Idols-Chapter 171: Office Remodeling

The day of my first shoot for ‘In My Office’ dawned.
The call time was 9 AM, but I didn’t want to get stuck in rush hour traffic, and I wanted to get a feel for the atmosphere and check out the set beforehand, so I left early and ended up arriving two hours ahead of schedule.
“Iwol, you’ve got plenty of time left. Want to wait in the car?”
“No, I still have a lot to learn, so I should go in and learn quickly. I’ll head straight to the set!”
And so, I was now loitering around the filming site, careful not to get in anyone’s way.
It was my first time seeing a drama shoot. The atmosphere was different from music video shoots, which was quite interesting.
‘They built the set well.’
They had apparently rented out an empty office space and furnished it with props, but everything looked so natural and lived-in. The props team must have worked hard.
As I stood against the wall, sneaking glances at the site, I noticed the director’s expression darkening by the second.
He pointed back and forth between the papers in his hand and a partition, his gestures making it clear that something had gone terribly wrong.
“Did the setup team not look at the layout before they left?!”
The director’s roar echoed through the set. Everyone’s eyes turned towards him.
“Did they even bother to check the layout? Ah, these bastards are driving me crazy.”
The director roughly ran his hand through his hair. No one dared to ask him what was wrong.
Beside him, the assistant director, who was staring at what seemed to be the layout plan, looked just as troubled.
“If we call the setup team now, how long will it take them to get here?”
“Even if they leave right away, it’s rush hour… They might arrive on time, but they won’t be able to finish the setup by the call time.”
“The actors are all arriving at 9. This doesn’t even make sense. They’re not rookies, how would they make such a mistake?”
The discussion even escalated to calling back the setup team.
I cautiously observed the situation, then carefully asked a staff member who had just stepped away from the director’s group.
“Excuse me, did something happen?”
The staff member glanced around and whispered,
“The male lead’s desk, its position is completely wrong.”
“The desk?”
“The team leader’s desk has a specific spot, but the setup team seems to have copied the layout of the office next door. They didn’t look at the layout plan.”
For a filming set, where cameras had to move seamlessly dozens of times, this was a significant issue.
Even so, couldn’t they just move the desk to its designated spot? It didn’t seem like a difficult task.
“Can’t we just move the desk now?”
The suggestion had already come up among the staff.
There were plenty of strong people here; moving a few tables and rearranging props, although incredibly tough, could be done within two hours.
However, the director didn’t give the go-ahead.
“Is moving the desks all there is to it? What about the LAN cables! They’re all molded to the floor, you want to rip them all out before filming? Or do you want the main character’s computer to have no internet every other scene? Don’t you know viewers zoom in on everything?”
The main issue was that they couldn’t touch the internet cables installed on the floor. Usually, that was how it was. Unlike furniture, LAN cables required a separate contractor.
But there were only a few computers, and it was just a matter of connecting the cables to the ports…
“Hello, Director-nim. I’m really sorry to interrupt.”
“Mr. Iwol? Why are you here so early?”
“I thought it wouldn’t be good for the youngest actor to be late, so I hurried a little. But would the problem be solved if we just moved Team Leader Ji’s desk?”
The director gave me a skeptical look.
“Yes, but… it’s not that simple right now. We need to discuss it first…”
“I think I can handle it… Would it be okay if I tried?”
A look of doubt flickered across the director’s face.
And understandably so—time was tight, and to them, I was just a 21-year-old rookie.
“I appreciate the enthusiasm, but there are a lot of things involved. We’ve already organized the cables to prevent the cameras or actors from tripping. It would be problematic if we had to rip them out.”
“Yes, I’ll keep that in mind while I work.”
“What?”
I only had two lines in the first episode.
For these two lines, I had to go to the salon early in the morning. After the shoot, I had to go brainstorm fan meeting ideas. I didn’t have a moment to spare.
So, I couldn’t stand the thought of the shoot being delayed because of the setup team and rearranging tables.
I brought over the backpack I’d been carrying since the Do Younghwan audition and placed it on the floor.
And I pulled out a handful of cable ties.
I even put on the work gloves I’d been carrying around since the drum barrel charcoal fire incident and diligently started removing the floor molding. Only in the necessary areas.
If this was a real office, I would have had to match the cable numbers to avoid messing up the IPs.
But it was different on a set this small.
There wouldn’t be any IP conflicts with just a few PCs, and no one would be doing actual work, so as long as they were connected, it would be fine.
This way, instead of rearranging all the desks, I could just swap a few wires around.
As I busily tied the cables with a few cable ties in my mouth, I was reminded of the old days.
The days when I would personally buy electrical tape to wrap around exposed wires and get roped into setting up network cables every time my office moved.
Looking back, I wondered how I managed to do all that.
Luckily, the previous wiring job was neat, so I only had to move two or three desks. After that, I crawled under the desks to bundle up any loose wires and reattached the molding with tape.
Finally, I gave the molding a few good kicks to make sure it stayed in place.
“Director-nim, would this be alright? I’ll move the props after you check the positions!”
The director, who had been staring blankly, nodded.
See? I told you it wasn’t a difficult problem.
Smiling brightly, I moved the props to their new locations. Then I was told by a staff member, ‘Mr. Iwol, stop working and go wait!’ and then by my manager, ‘Iwol, stay seated until someone calls you!’.
* * *
“So? You went and did more work?”
Lee Cheonghyeon said, sounding exasperated.
“What else was I supposed to do? The shoot would’ve been delayed otherwise.”
“I heard acting takes up a lot of time, and I guess that’s true.”
“Exactly.”
This time, I agreed with Lee Cheonghyeon. I’d been on set all day, and all I contributed were two lines: ‘Sir, here are the documents you requested’, and ‘Well, I guess going home on time is out of the question for a while’.
By the way, Ha Seomyeong delivered the same ad-lib on set as she did during the script reading. My heart almost gave out.
“Hyung, your role is an office worker, right? A stockbroker?”
“Yeah. Why? Does it not suit me?”
“No, it suits you too well. That’s what’s weird.”
“What does that even mean…?”
I shook my head and pulled out my planner when Lee Cheonghyeon spoke again from behind me.
“But it really is strange.”
“What is?”
“You, hyung. Why does it feel so natural for you to be an office worker?”
My heart skipped a beat.
Lee Cheonghyeon, however, remained nonchalant.
“I mean, it’s not like you’re the type to want to act all professional and competent. It just feels like you were an office worker all along.”
“Did you forget that I’ve been a trainee with you guys since I was twenty?”
“That’s why it’s strange.”
I tried to lighten the mood, but Lee Cheonghyeon was strangely serious.
“Do you have some kind of admiration for office workers? Or was it your dream job or something?”
“No way.”
It was my dream job when I was in high school, but admiration? Not even a little. If anything, I just want to escape the system entirely and live my life as a self-sufficient single-person household.
“Come to think of it, hyung, for all that you know about us, you barely talk about yourself.”
I felt a pang of guilt. From their perspective, there must have been moments where they felt I was seeing right through them.
“Are you curious about me?”
“Of course.”
“But you never ask.”
I opened my planner to the bookmarked page where I had jotted down ideas for the fan meeting…
“Because I don’t think you’ll answer.”
…My hand stopped.
I looked at Lee Cheonghyeon, who was lying on Choi Jeho’s bed, working on his laptop. He didn’t avoid my gaze.
Even so, I couldn’t bring myself to say, ‘If you’re curious, just ask.’
“See? You can’t even tell me to ask, can you?”
Lee Cheonghyeon knew me too well.
“But hyung, if work ever gets tough, you should talk about that at least.”
“…Why are you saying this all of a sudden?”
“Well, you always handle everything for us anyway.”
Lee Cheonghyeon shrugged.
“So you should tell the members about your work, too. That way, things stay balanced.”
With that, Lee Cheonghyeon turned back to his laptop screen. He looked a little awkward, maybe even embarrassed.
Pretending not to notice his feelings, I grabbed my journal planner and pen and left the room.
***
In the past, I went to a Spark fan meeting exactly once.
At the time, UA was excessively obsessed with identity verification. Since I valued personal information too much to use Manager Nam’s daughter’s account for proxy ticketing… well, that was how it ended up.
That day, I had never received that much attention in my life. Perhaps worried I’d feel left out, many people kindly shared free stickers with me.
So, what was Spark’s fan meeting actually like?
What’s there to say? It was incredibly boring.
Choi Jeho stared blankly into space, Park Joowoo glued his eyes to the floor, Kang Kiyeon rambled nonsense, and only Lee Cheonghyeon was running wild.
If I were Jeong Seongbin, I would have called everyone to the waiting room after the fan meeting and told them to pack their bags and leave if they hated it that much. Seongbin, please never leave this team.
‘Now, at least, they’re trying a little…’
How could we give Sparklers the best fan meeting possible?
A large-scale meeting to address this very question was held today in our dreadful basement practice room.