Category: Work

It’s never a fun thing to have to deal with yakuza because of a fuck-up created in your own procurement department.
Before Golden Week, the stupid noobie manager in Procurement, down the hall, decided to use a local company to mold parts for our products and went by their office yesterday afternoon for a friendly chat because the parts never arrived. He ended up coming straight to our office crying and about to wet his pants after noticing matching Ferraris and a Bentley in the car park of their gated office complex.
Fuck. The dumbshit picked, out of all the experienced vendors located in and around Kansai, a goddamn money trap. My manager is determined to get out of any situation we may find ourselves in without paying a single fucking yen to these guys. I find it ironic that I know otherwise and will have to explain to him why at some point in time. They hired me for my overseas business skills, but this time it’s as local as it gets. Man, they really lit a fire under my manager’s ass. He’s been in meetings with higher-ups all day. These corporate mafia types know how to threaten big companies, because that’s how they make a living. These guys are small time, though. This can be squashed at the lower levels.
I am so sick and tired of these petty mafia fucks popping up all over. Always gotta be on guard out here on the island. It’s a goddamn yakuza retirement community. One accident with the wrong car, and your ass is seaweed fertilizer. Hell, I joke about it, but another manager in this room is still making monthly payments to a yak his daughter bumped into at a nearby intersection more than five years ago. Goddamn it.

Went to do the annual physical for work today. Came back with bruised needle tracks. It was frightening to watch this inexperienced nurse with sweaty, fumbly hands try to find a vein in my arms. I swear to god this chick was blind in a previous life, because she used that needle like a walking stick, tap tap tap on one arm and then the other. Frustrated by lack of success, she binded both my arms with surgical tubing at the same time and told me to open and close my hands and sit in a corner for a few minutes (bitch, my arms turned blue before you came back).
No longer willing to persevere with the standard setup, she pulled the QUEEN MOTHER OF SYRINGES from a toolbox of medical goodies and started waving it in front of my face, saying, “now this might hurt a little.” I started whimpering in protest right then and there – the goddam thing looked like a turkey baster with a really long bicycle pump needle fitted on it. In my mind, we had the following conversation:

“Now wait just a goddam minute – just how much blood do you need?”
“Just a bit”
“So why can’t you use a smaller syringe – the hollow tip of that needle looks like a fucking cookie cutter!”
“Why, you’re right. You know what? I’ve stabbed you so many times today, I’ll just collect the blood smeared on all the needles I’ve used and that should be enough for our purposes. You are free to proceed to the hearing test.”

In reality, of course, things happened differently. She sucked many shot glasses worth of blood along with half of my right bicep into that syringe like a Hoover and the high point of the entire day was that I got to yell “OOOW! YER SUCKIN’ TOO HARD!” in public and started trembling with the kind of laughter that causes physical pain (needle in arm), but is somehow worth it.
By the time my exsanguination was complete, there were fifteen other guys waiting to get poked and they all thought my outburst was pretty funny. Except for the next guy in line. He was visibly disturbed when Nurse Naomi started squirting my blood from the syringe into the vials.
Update: It turns out that about one in four people are getting poked in both arms by this angel of destruction. Those are some seriously horrendous numbers. I can understand that doctors suck at needlework, but for nurses this sort of incompetence is unforgivable. To my little sister who plans to start med school next year: Please take this advice. Practicing on lemons and oranges isn’t good enough.

Work screed alert: If my writing about work at a large Japanese electronics company doesn’t tickle your fancy, please take a minute to bite me (I’m tired of e-mails dictating what I can and cannot write about, particularly ones from “Japan experts”. Go and kiss chrysanthemums somewhere else.).
Now then. Suppose that you were late for work on the first day of the new fiscal year, and that you walked into the office as your co-workers were halfway through the “morning exercise” routine. Would you:
A. Enthusiastically do jumping-jacks with the rest of the sheep while moving toward your desk
B. Sit at your desk and wait for normalcy to return while starting up your PC
C. Upon seeing the madness as you entered the room, quietly slip back out the door and lurk in the john for a few minutes
D. Run into the room, scream “FIRE”, and run back out
I am not a total ovine quite yet as I chose B. A guy who sits close to me opted for A, and another opted for C. Now that I have had my ass chewed off for choosing B, I wish that I had instead chosen D. A brand new senior manager made a point of getting in my face about not performing the exercises, which would be fine except that he did it out loud so that everybody could hear, a full-on drill sergeant dressing-down. Luckily, the general manager, who is a great friend, stepped in and squashed the whole thing, ending with “Anybody else who can do the work Justin does is entitled to ignore the exercises as well, hell I might stop doing them myself.” As flattering as that statement was, about 50,000 red warning lights went off in my head at once and all I could think of was getting out from between two duelists. The room was silent. Nobody in the office is coming over to chat today. It’s days like this when I really look forward to my future life in Thailand, perhaps tending a herd of water buffalo or chasing flocks of birds away rice paddies with the kids.
I wish I had kids already. I would go home tonight and sit with them at dinner and they would ask what I did at work today. I would say, “kids, today daddy became a pawn in an inter-office power play!”
“Wow, coooool” they would reply.
Then I would relate to them all that happened today in detail and what was to be learned from it all. Which is, of course, “if you ever walk into an uncomfortable situation, scream ‘FIRE’ at the top of your lungs and run out of the room as fast as you can.”

Today is the last day of another fiscal year here. This is the first non-work related thing I have written this week. I am in spreadsheet mode and have no brain cells left for blogging. But I have much to write stored in my brain. Will attempt a post later in the week.

It is just past ten o’ clock and I am stewing in my own fumes. I ate a plate of spicy Thai pork for breakfast and it is now overly apparent that the secret ingredient was garlic. Normally I would have no complaint as the breath of death keeps perky morning office assistants at arm’s length until well past lunch, but today I have a meeting. With bigwigs from overseas. Overseas as in, “garlic novice” overseas. Heh.
I have popped a lemon cough drop in my mouth and it now feels as if I could marinate a chicken in there to make some exotic chinese dish. Hooray for honey-lemon eucalyptus. This should do the trick as long as I keep a lozenge in my mouth at all times.
Except that now I’ve started burping under my breath. Garlicky richness erupts from the depths… Guess I’ll show up at that meeting with some stakes and holy water just to get into my role – wouldn’t that be a first! I’ll completely redefine my company’s approach to hostile negotiations…

A client just asked for a 90MB 3D CAD file data to be sent on multiple storage mediums: 250MB Zip, 100MB Zip, CD-R, 128MB MO, and split up on floppies for God’s sake! His reasoning: The workshop in Singapore uses old equipment. He will not listen to my reasoning along the lines of, “if they can open a 3D CAD file that size, I would assume they can surely pull data off a CD.”
Somebody send me an IT geek with a few free hours to play the floppy insert-write-eject-label game (cuz I really SUCK at it)! Well, this is a first if nothing else. All hail the mighty morphin’ corporate tech retards!

When the president of the staffing company (5,500 employees) you work for makes it a point to see you in person by pulling you from your desk in front of the whole office, you may feel several hundred thousand butterflies moshing at the Pantera concert in your stomach as you get up and proceed to an adjacent conference room.
Then, when he offers you 3,000 yen ($30) for every gaijin you can introduce that signs on to the firm with the single stipulation that “they are like you”, you can nod and say thank you.
Then again, you could always point out that he is implying your own worth and feel insulted. And tell him the last time you saw somebody sold for so little it was paid for in crack and the bitch looked skankier than Paris Hilton after a six-week opiate binge. Or you could also explain that $30 isn’t even enough to hire an illegal immigrant to do your yardwork back home in sunny CA. To top it all off, you could tell him in your best gutteral gangsta-Japanese to shove it up his ass.
Me, I just nodded and said thank you.

The manager for the packaging design department came to me with a blank procurement form last year and said, “Fill these out. We need a new Mac; you have 1,000,000 yen to spend on it.” My mind was instantly filled with images of a dual processor G5, Apple Cinema display, striped and mirrored SCSI backup system, Firewire-powered cappuccino maker, etc., you know, The Perfect System. I almost cried. (I say “almost” because this would have been a dream in my Mac maven phase, say five or six years ago.)
Well, I came even closer to crying today when I saw how this new girl, the Designated Mac Operator in the design room was using the Perfect System. She had the 23″ Apple Cinema HD Display (max. resolution 1,920 x 1,200) at the lowest resolution possible, 800 x 500 while laying out pages in PageMaker. I couldn’t believe my eyes even though I watched her 1337 operating skillz for a good 5 minutes over her shoulder. The only possible analogy I can come up with would be sitting two feet from a movie screen; as in TOO CLOSE to a good thing. My man, the folders on the desktop (to mix metaphors) were the size of matchbooks. I later found out that she lowers the resolution instead of using zoom tools in the DTP programs. Amazing.

Found an article from last month that hit close to home:
Competition stiffens to work oneself to death
Let Salaryman tell you something about dedication: Too much can kill, and blind dedication is either for the young, or for well-paid upper management. Even in these two cases, there is only so much you can accomplish before you break down.
With that in mind, keep it real and work your ass off. By playing your cards right, your investment of time and life energy will eventually be returned in the form of work experience and maybe a nice watch (standard-issue salaryman bling-bling).
Ulcers. Yes, it seems everybody has them around here. Like everyone else, I have a horror story. Two years ago, my senior partner on a prototyping project sat up quite suddenly in his seat and handed me a stack of documents. His eyes were bulging as he bent over and proceeded to noisily vomit blood into the wastebasket. Then he slumped over in his chair and the girls in the room started screaming. When the departmental manager left the room to find the nurse on call, homeboy opened his eyes, pointed to the aforementioned stack of papers, and said “tanomu wa” (Get it done.).
Now, this guy is a legend. He is the most dedicatedist motherfucker I have ever met, and a pain in the ass to work for because of his scrupulousness – he put the “ei” in “einaru”, if you know what I mean. And he ended up spewing entrail juice. Coincidence? Hardly. So that is the moral of this story – the most dedicated person in the office always ends up vomiting blood.
The End

Lying on my desk is a document entitled:
Lohms vs. Orifice Size
I don’t know who put it there, but apparently I get to make a presentation on it later this morning. in Japanese! Yay!
Welcome to the modern state of technical translation, where a total ignoramus like myself can hop on the Al Gore Expressway and become an expert on any specialized subject matter in a matter of seconds – and before you ask, no, a Lohm is not a penis (but an orifice is, well, an orifice). A Lohm is a Liquid ohm – get it? Ohms are units used to express electrical resistance, so morphazenilinguistically speaking, Lohms are the units used for liquid resistance. This unit of measure, when pronounced by my Japanese colleagues, sounds like “Rohm”, which is an electronics component maker based in Kyoto. (Sorry if you thought I was going to continue in the vein of fluid dynamics; the best I can do for you there is to promise a future update about writing my name in the snow.)
I wrote a slogan for Rohm’s public relations department when I first started my career as a non-gaijin-looking gaijin in a translation company years ago. It didn’t seem like a special job or anything, they just needed a catch line for a “small advertising effort” in English and they faxed over some sentences in Japanese to base it on (BTW they had a G4 fax machine that seemed super fast compared to standard G3 fax machines but often suffered from mysterious transmission failures.). I ended up creating three or four different variations for them to choose between and thought little of what would become of it thereafter. Turns out they ended up using it in their radio and television commercials, which were aired quite frequently on national television. It was also used on company brochures, posters, etc., and somewhat less gloriously, on the back covers of obscure trade magazines with names like “Precision Mounted Chip Design” and “Capacitors Weekly.” I admit, I was proud whenever I saw my words out in the real world. (I feel free to talk about it now because they are no longer using it on their website and the posters in the subway stations are long gone. Also, regardless of what I post below, I think it was a great ad campaign and hope it was a success for Rohm.) In a way, I felt silly on the importance being placed on a simple phrase I thought up at the spur of the moment. Then again, simplicity is often the best option, and it was gratifying to see my words in print and pixel broadcast to millions. Millions and millions of potential clients who might make a decision based on seeds planted in their heads by effective advertising. And if it sounds like it started getting to my head, that’s because it did at the peak of the ad campaign.
Sometimes the commercials would come on when I was watching TV with other people (sometimes clients) and it was a turbo-nitro ego boost when the leggy models in the ads paraded around futuristic space-and-satellite backdrops with my words flowing out of their mouths. People I was with would usually give me props and I would just bask in the glory as everyone came to the realization that, in a way, these girls were actually my mindslaves. Through the looking glass of manga/Kubrickian reality where my reasoning takes vacations after steady consumption of alcohol, the mindslaves on the screen seemed completely powerless to resist. They returned to the screen at regular intervals to convey my thoughts. They awaited further orders. They waited for anything, some kind of sign or command. There they remain to this day. Faithfully waiting.
Wanting!
Needing!
OK, so maybe it got to my head a little bit more than I care to admit, but it was still kinda cool for a salaryman who was just starting out and trying to make his mark on the world. Especially when the cute models were replaced by a fly. Not just any fly. The Fly. According to this Japanese fan site, Rohm chose Jeff Goldblum because his role as a scientist in the movie Jurassic Park (released in Japan shortly after the commercials started airing) perfectly fit the image of the company’s high tech products (and also because he was new to Japandering). As a famous actor later to be known for 13375ki11s with a Powerbook, and used to dealing with the mind games and manipulation that is show biz, would he be impervious to my powers? Heh.
Wanting!
Needing!