Nov 06 2007
Starting week 3
I’ve finished my first two weeks at my new job. There have been tons of new experiences, some of which are specific to working in Japan and some of just come with the ¡Ègetting your first real job¡É deal. I apologize for any overlap as I am yet unable to sort out the difference. First of all, the hours are loooooong. Being employed at a financial company I’ve got a hunch that this is very much a ¡Èfinancial industry¡É thing. However, given Japan’s reputation for overworking its employees, I’m wondering if I get some sort of special double-layer effect. Long hours because it’s finance times two ’cause it’s freakin’ Japan. Yeah, I’m still trying to adjust from a college lifestyle (two hours of class and an addition two [maybe] of studying per day) to my current salaryman schedule (14 hours a day). I’m really hoping this feeling of ¡Èpaid imprisonment¡É will pass soon. I try to remind myself that people don’t turn down ivy-league schools just because they’re worried they might spend too much time studying. I’ll let the reader draw the connection there.Secondly, for all intensive purposes I’m in an all-Japanese environment. People in my team can speak English and I do have some foreign friends that I met in orientation, but all the day-to-day stuff is in Japanese. This is a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. Most of my communication with my coworkers is either receiving orders (hey, could you send off that confirmation?), having stuff explained to me (then you select this file and put it in excel like this), or just regular conversation (albeit politely because everyone is my senior). Before I started, I thought I’d have to be talking about crazy financial concepts that I don’t even have a firm grasp of in English. Nah, turns out most of that ends up as borrowed words in Japanese anyways. Unfortunately right now things seem to be especially busy for my team, so people don’t always have the time to go through things step-by-step with me. This creates a lot of downtime for me while I wait for people to be unbusy again. As the weeks go by and I learn more of what I’m supposed to be doing things will get better.I apologize if this post is poorly written. My English brain becomes sort of addled after a long day at work. I just wanted to give everyone a heads up that I’m alive, some initial impressions, and maybe an insight or two.
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I too know the stigma of the corporate world. We should get out now; I will by June, anyway, pending the results of the¡¡¥í¡¼¥È tonight.