Category: Work

… for I will never eat sharkfin soup again.
Yesterday I was in Himeji on a business trip. After our meetings, we went to the top of Himeji castle in the miserable heat and walked our clients a fair distance to their posh hotel. We then walked to the inconveniently located and much crappier hotel that we were staying at (a pox on our financial dept.), changed out of our dripping-with-perspiration dress shirts into casual ones, and immediately headed out for Chinese food back at the client’s hotel restaurant.
I was on my third small glass of beer before the food came, and had just finished my bowl of sharkfin and crab soup and a couple of light entrees when I felt the rumbling in my stomach. An ominous rumbling.
To make a long story short, I suffered from either:
A. Heatstroke
B. Dehydration
C. Food Poisoning
D. Thermal shock, or
E. All of the above
I did not make it to the restroom in time.
Cupping my hand over my mouth only resulted in directing the explosive stream of sour vomit all over my shirt and slacks. My shirtfront was covered with semi-digested bits of crab meat and black fungus from the soup, plus other sour beer-smelling detritus.
I finally made it into a stall, got lightheaded, and almost dunked my head in the toilet before I realized there was an unflushed turd in it. This made me purge even more, after flushing a few hundred times (even I cannot sink so low as to puke on another man’s turd).
After I washed off my face and most of the puke off my clothes, I attempted to dry my shirt so as not to make it immediately noticeable that I had lost my cookies when I returned to the table. I fooled nobody for very long, since I turned green after smelling the greasy Chinese food again.
I excused myself before the next wave of nausea hit, weakly stumbled to the hotel lobby and hailed a cab outside. The cabbie was being a fucking cunt and seeing my still-damp shirtfront, asked if I’d been drinking. I said “what’s it to you,” and he threatened to stop the car and kick me out. I threatened to puke on the floor if he stopped before we reached my hotel… Thus I got back in a precarious state of stalemate.
I collapsed on the hotel bed and the world went away for a few sweet, blessed hours. I woke up before midnight feeling completely restored, and was unable to sleep again. I took a walk on the empty streets of the city, swearing off sharkfin soup and remembering the most important things in life.
With work, I am disenchanted.
The most important thing in life, at any given time, is not to be puking your guts out.

Today I wasn’t allowed to correct the phrase, “for you apploval,” on an official letter because it was “written by someone on the board of directors.” The guy who told me this rolled his eyes as he said it, too. I almost snapped him in two like a pencil, but thought better of it. Instead, I asked the ficus in the break room why the hell they even bother running this crap by me if they won’t let me make corrections.
The ficus thought about it for awhile, then came up with a fairly satisfying answer: Apparently, demi-gods are allowed to make up their own grammar. Duh! Stupid me…

Because today did not start off so well (I almost got in TWO accidents on the way to work, where I was promptly chastised for not buttoning down the button-down collars on my new pink shirt – how could I make something like that up?), I was happy to read my mom’s commentary on the party they had at home. Apparently, we in the Land of the Big Red Rising Riceball missed out on:
– Hot Dogs
– Barbecued Kalbi
– Silver Queen corn
– Homegrown zucchini, eggplant, Maui onions, and bell peppers
– My Auntie Betty’s potato salad, fresh-baked cookies, and a “crusty, crunchy coffee toffee cake”
– 20 pounds of King crab legs
– Case of oysters
– Lumpia
– Auntie Ling’s steamed ginger/scallion flounder and deep-fried flounder
…and to top it all off, S’mores.
The thing that really gets me though, is that they were able to make S’mores in our fireplace. Living in Japan for so long, I basically forgot those things existed.

Awash in pink sea,
Workers in new uniform,
Banzai off a cliff.
//
Explanation: Today the Nihon Keizai Shimbun leaked that my company is laying off 10,000 employees! Can’t help but wonder how many could have been saved, say by not changing the uniforms for the entire workforce. And I’m sure that the 10,000 that get the axe will be thrilled to have learned their fate from a newspaper!

And so it shall be. Tomorrow, July 1st, is the beginning of my end. Yes, tomorrow I will be wearing light bluish-gray trousers with elastic waistband, and a short-sleeve pink button down shirt w/red accents. It is unfathomably bad.
Yet I know you are all with me in spirit, yes?
Apparently so, for I have heard requests for pictures of the new duds from around the world! You are all bad people, and will burn in hell for teasing me. And yet, it somehow seems fitting (the hell part).
The thing is, I have never actually revealed my company on this blog – you may find it interesting that I made writing about my work experiences permissible part of my contract, back when I started the job 5+ years ago (although I only started blogging a couple years ago, I started writing the Salaryman Adventures in late 2000.) They basically told me to use discretion and not sell any blueprints to the Soviets, and I have honored those conditions. Posting a uniform is a gray area in my mind, insofar as that if you don’t know what major electronics company has a manufacturing base on Awajishima, neither should you be able to guess by our new metrosexual uniforms.
Plus, what am I? Your puppet? A dancing bear? Your biiiiiooooooootch? Must I heed your every whim and post humiliating photos of myself for your pleasure?
As a Japanese Yoda would say, “pondering, I must.”

Gatson came by the house last night to install the English version of MS Project, and he told me about our new work uniforms, which we will be issued around the end of the month and have to wear from July 1st. I came into work today and confirmed the new design with the other guys in the office:
– Pink shirts with red collars
– Light green pants
An alternative title for this post is, “The REAL Reason I’m Leaving This Job and Country.”
Apparently there is a leak at our company at a higher level, because they are ripping this decision to threads over at 2ch. Pretty funny shit, but it would be a lot funnier if it were happening to someone else…
BTW, there’s still no news about which board member’s fashion school dropout nephew designed this abortion of a color scheme.

In today’s interoffice memo, the official English language nomenclature was revealed: CONCENTRETION TIME.
This filled me with great joy for some truly inexplicable reason, and I was immediately tempted to stab my eyes out with a sharp pencil.
//
In other news, the supposed 60-year holdouts of the Japanese Imperial Army in the mountains of Mindanao are proving to be more elusive than Yamashita’s gold. (There’s a Leon Uris novel in there somewhere, I know it.)
And now, back to concentretion.

Wow. Talk about killing the party vibe, dude – the old man ain’t even here today! He wussed out and went on a trip or something, so our protesting stunts are kind of pointless… Yet it’s funny to mock the lauded Concentration Time even in his absence, so the office is a flurry of activity right now.
People are talking loudly on the phones about totally nonsense shit, having group discussions from across the office, and the guy next to me is singing (softly, granted, but still…). I, myself, drank a liter of water during lunch and have gone to the head three times in the past twenty minutes. Just doing my part, you know. Because my ultimate goal is to someday be told to hold it, at which point I will whip it out and shower thee golden, I swear.
By the way, the official length of Concentration Time has already been shortened – it now runs from 1:00 to 2:40PM. It will be interesting to see if my Japanese comrades still show the same audacity tomorrow or whenever the old man gets back. All I know is that I’m having a liter of water with lunch for the foreseeable future; this is too much fun.
DOWN WITH CONCENTRATION TIME, I SAY! DOWN!

Maybe I can appeal tomorrow’s Concentration Time by pleading time proactively served by my relatives at Manzanar… I really did try to get work done today, but I was too pissed off.

I’ve put up with the various quirks and idiosyncrasies common to westerners working in corporate Japan for quite some time now and I think I’ve done very well, overall. But today I came this close to blowing my stack, just going COMPLETELY FUCKING NUTS, in front of the whole office, because MOST JAPANESE ADULTS ARE ACTUALLY JUST (SLIGHTLY) OVERGROWN CHILDREN… Ahh, now I feel much better with that off my chest.
So what set me off? (this time)
Our senior manager, in his infinite wisdom, has decided to enstate a “concentration period” from 12:25 to 2:40 PM every day, when we will not be allowed to leave our desks except to get printouts or use the CAD room. He specifically stated we could not talk, use the phone, or go to the restroom during this period. He says this is to raise the efficiency of this office. #@!”#””$#%!(‘(&%(%@”!!#%!! (motherfucker, say what?)
This rule goes into effect tomorrow.
I have already announced to my supervisor that I will take a piss whenever I damn well please, and asked how fucking old everyone in this office is that we have to be told when we can or can’t leave our FUCKING SEATS TO GET WORK DONE. I mean, give me a fucking break (and give me a fucking KitKat), how the fuck do you fucking expect us to be fucking competetive with other fucking electronics companies when you fuck us with these fucking stupid-ass rules and meaningless fucking exercises in fucking assfuckery?
But that’s not all, there’s a punchline to this fucking joke: At the end of his announcement, our great leader proudly announced that he got this brilliant idea from a television program he saw last week.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! HA!