10 posts tagged “work”

You know, you can't seriously expect to have an affair/ relationship in your office without anyone knowing about it. It just is not possible. It's probably the fastest-moving news that ever goes down those unofficial channels that real information would go to and fro. (Aside from lay-off rumors, that is.)

Man, this must be something cosmic; electronic karma or something. I wrote in here how much time I've been spending pretending to be doing something in the office, and now I've got a whole bunch of stuff to take care of (all of which, one way or the other, is a result of Ex-Investment Bank taking money from FRB. FRB wants all kinds of data no one around here's been interested in before). 

What's so wrong, you ask?? There's space in the morning Yamanote line. Space. Around you. In the morning rush hour. You can even hold up a paperback on the train without your elbow touching on anyone. (If you have spent some amount of time in Tokyo, you would have noticed the definition of rush hour in Tokyo is, well, pretty dense.)

And this happened two days straight. I'm starting to be seriously worried about how this whole crisis in economy thing is turning out.

The American investment bank I infiltrate apparenlty started laying off some people. So far I'm not one of them, though you'd never know... Me getting fired would mean more posts from me, my fellow Voxers. Also I would have more time to work on stuff that's making "slowly but surely" kind of progress (writing, learning how to code using CSS, putting together my "intellectual rap" track on GarageBand, etc). And, oh yeah, let's not forget the fecking pile of books that I need to tackle. 

Having been a Salaryman Impersonator infiltrating an American financial institution for a while, I have garnered following insights;

Seriously. There was this big fecking hole in my pants that I've been wearing to go to the office every day. I suspect it was there since last week.
It's about 5-6cm (like 2 inches) long and about 1 cm (1/2.5 inch) wide, at the right side of my right knee. Funny you could spend 12 hours in the office without noticing something like this...
But then again, how could nobody not notice this? I've been walking around quite a bit (even went to two meetings) and nobody said to me like, "dude, you've got a big dumb hole in your pants". Contrary to popular notion, people just don't pay attention to what other people are wearing, or are they just laughing at my back or something?

So I went to the office today, with another, hole-less pants, and asked around; people who had most contact with me obviously didn't notice (or they acted very well). So the notion that clothing are more like symbol than antyhing else is probably correct; as long as you appear to be like everyone else in the environment, people pay little attention to details (I remembered a scene in Shawshank Redemption where Tim Robbins says nobody ever pay attention to your shoes).

...By the way, AdSense is recommending me to check "6th Grade Writing; A Dedicated Website to 6th Grade Writing". Apparently, my English writing skill is considered to be laughable and childlike. Meh.

Lately, especially in one of those days when things were hectic in the office, I'm finding myself liking to put on some jazz music and read the latest Japanese edition of "In Search of Lost Time". Proust is so slow and languid, it makes a good contrast to help unwind, I guess. He's also wonderful with paying attention to details and emotions, it makes me aware how much of life I'm missing when I'm focused too much on some paperwork in an office so high up above the ground.
What's your method of chilling out?

According to CNN, over 80% of adult Asian Americans hold a college degree; yet there's only 1% of Asian American executives on the board of Fortune 500 companies. Very interesting, although they didn't give me a clear "why" on this point. One guy was saying Asians are too humble to get ahead in corporate America (which sounds like crap as most of the Asian Americans they are talking about are not immigrants but "home-grown")... (?_?)

This week has been pretty busy at the office. Part of the reason is that we need to communicate with a law firm which happens to be located on pretty much the other side of the planet. This fact leads to lots of problems, especially if you are basically the only one person in your team who can use English in what you might describe as business-level. Come on, this is an American enterprise. Hire at least one more...

Because of the time zone, exchange of e-mail would pretty much take a day to go back and fourth. When the schedule is tight, there's no margin for error because if they need to ask something that I forgot to describe, you lose at least one day to address that problem.
This is quite wasteful. I hope some type of technology will solve this problem one day. For example, (okay I got this idea watching Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex...:-) you program this "virtual self" that exists in a virtual conference room. You give all the basic facts/ what-if scenarios/ answers to expected questions to this mirror image of yours. Someone in different time zone would access to this virtual conference room and talk to "virtual me", and as far as this particular business issue goes, gets the answers I would want to give (since the topic is very limited, it shouldn't be THAT difficult to write such program should it?). Next morning, I go to the same virtual conference room, and talk to the virtual self of this person from the law firm on the other side of the planet. This would (although it won't completely erase the time-zone issue) tremendously reduce the amount of stress.

But it won't be a reality in any time soon, I guess. Next week sounds nice though.

Some gamers claim that life is actually one big MMORPG. In similar vein, the office work is pretty much like Real Time Strategy. If I were in a hiring position and three candidates show up, one who doesn't play games, one who plays RTS but sucks, and the one who is a killer RTS player, I would think the last person would have the basic skills you ever need in a modern day office.

If you are good with the RTS, then you must be able to keep up with ever changing situation, adapt your approach accordingly, and act swiftly. If you can memorize all the Protoss units, fastest way to upgrade your French civilization to the Industrial Age, and can tell the difference between Space Marines and Chaos Space Marines, you should have no problem remembering all those small bits and pieces of stuff that come with spending your daytime in an office.

On top of that, a good RTS player no doubt can move and point that mouse quickly and accurately, and must be no stranger to shortcuts. You'll be surprised how many people point things around slooowly and have no clue how to speed things up with a few key strokes- you would almost go, "dude, I would have wiped our your base by now".

So the kids should be encouraged to play more RTS IMHO....