Working at a Japanese company

[mogski 0]

IIII what does you lawyer freind do when he is away on business and needs something typed up to go out in 30 mins? Take his secretary?

 

We had a lawyer with extraordinary fees representing this company and we experienced this puter problem. Couldn't use a puter so everything was hand written and sometimes given to some of our people here to type up for him. Read HAD a lawyer!

[Ocean11 0]

So there you go! Another reason to hate lawyers.

 

Mogs, is your company by any chance the manufacturer of that once revolutionary aircraft the Zero-sen? ... for which my old company made the avionics (an achievement glossed over the company brochure...)

[badmigraine 0]

Yeh mogs is right...this grand-daddy lawyer had a good legal sense and loads of experience, but he couldn't use a computer and couldn't type either.

 

In the negotiations he'd say "Let me take a stab at drafting that provision..."

 

Then he'd sit at a table by the window with a pencil and a big yellow legal pad, slowly writing in longhand.

 

The full negotiating teams would be on a break or just sitting around waiting for him to finish.

 

Eventually, he would complete his masterpiece, then pass it to ME, a lawyer, to type up. His writing was almost illegible, it was notoriously hard to read and even in his own firm there were only a couple of secretaries who could decipher it.

 

I'd type up a rough version as best I could, then print it out with blanks where I couldn't make out the words.

 

Then, I'd have to track him down in whatever place he'd wandered off to, sit him down with the longhand draft and my typed version, and watch him pore over it, explain the illegible words, then make more longhand changes and revisions.

 

Then I'd go back to type up the 2nd version, print it out, track him down wherever he had wandered off to, get his corrections again...and so on 3-4 times until we'd finished the job.

 

For a half-page paragraph of legalese, this rigamarole would often take 2-3 hours. He couldn't use e-mail, so he'd get a constant stream of faxes that would have to be brought to him in meetings or negotiations...then he'd write out a longhand response for someone to type up.

 

I once caught him dictating a long letter over the phone to his secretary in America...we got a bill for his time, then had to pay for the phone call too.

 

His billing rate? $570 per hour.

 

Boy were we getting ripped off.

 

This guy was totally helpless when out of his office and away from his secretary.

 

IIIII, there are lawyers who can function without computers, and lawyers who can use computers but shouldn't, in order to maximize their efficiency.

 

But this guy was a prime example of someone who needed to sit down for an hour and learn to use one.

 

I wasn't the only one acting as his Tokyo secretary either. It took two or three people to take care of him on his trips...

 

I'm a lawyer myself, and it bothered me to have to sit there as this guy's secretary, when I had plenty of legal work to do.

 

I complained a few times, but got nowhere.

 

The irony is, that company brought ME in in 1995 saying "we are tired of using this old grand-daddy and want to change..."

 

It was really galling. Here this guy comes and takes me away from my productive work, and uses me as a typist at the company's expense, then sends us a bill for $570/hr. for our trouble?

 

Sheesh.

 

Eventually there WAS a sea-change when the company was partially taken over by Germans. In keeping with his normal practices, he royally pissed off the management of that German company on more than one occasion...we eventually got a letter from their vice-president complaining "Who is this strange man from America, and how much are we paying him?"

 

When the answer came back "several million US$ per year", we got rid of him and used other, younger lawyers who could type.

 

A final note on computing for lawyers... I've been doing consulting work here in Michigan, and two weeks ago I sent off an important e-mail with 3 MS Word attachments...it was a Japanese company's final comments in a $300 Million joint venture.

 

Two weeks later, we'd heard nothing, so called up to ask why they were ignoring our comments.

 

Turns out they never got them!

 

"Well, what happens is, if an e-mail has attachments, our servers think it is spam or virus-laden, so it does not get through the firewall..."

 

"Uh...OK...uh...but you guys send US e-mails with attachments all the time..."

 

"Yes, we can send out attachments no problem."

 

"Uh...well, do you want me to fax these comments?"

 

"No, we need the computer file so we can make a markup and print clean copies for upper management..."

 

"Uh...OK...uh, well, what do you propose?"

 

"Can you send us a floppy disk by regular mail? They sometimes get damaged in shipping, so can you send two copies, each in separate envelopes?"

 

TRUE STORY

 

[Fattwins 0]

I dont want to be a lawyer you work too damm much.

[Ocean11 0]

I had battles at my old company over their insane computing policies. They made it so that using the computer was like walking on eggshells. There were bricks-for-brains country OLs who were frightened that a computer virus could plant an icubus in their womb, then they'd have a lot of explaining to do.

 

There was a constant stream of new and tighter restrictions on what you could do because of the 'potential' of viruses and data theft. It never once occurred to them that the biggest problem was people using their computers inefficiently and ineptly, and malicious people (of whom there truly are very few indeed) dumping stuff onto an MO and stealing it (yeah, but who would know what to do with it anyway?). At one point, there was a recommendation that all the monitor screens be painted black to prevent theft of data.

 

There was a filter on the network that prevented you accessing anything of interest on the Internet. Visit almost any website that was not actually a company website, and a threatening 'we are watching you - access denied. (You may apply to have this restriction lifted)' message came up. Outraged and inconvenienced, I demanded that it be lifted in my case so that I could pursue my research unhindered. Lifted it was. I later found out that I was the only person in a company of 4,000 who had ever asked for it to be lifted, and the tech dweebs and anti-personnel dept. had had a hell of a time deciding if I should be allowed to be exempt.

 

(The painting the screens black thing -- I made that up.)

[scouser 4]

If the lawyer guy is doing an amazing job there without the need for staring at screens,..... GOOD FOR HIM!

[viv&kev 0]

Sounds lucky to me.

[badmigraine 0]

When I first got to my J company in the mid-90s, you could still chainsmoke at your "desk" (just a giant open area of metal desks pushed together so everyone is basically sitting jammed up next to each other in one big room).

 

Many, many people took advantage of the freedom to smoke and the place was a blue haze of stinking secondhand-smoke all day long, every day.

 

I recall two amusing anecdotes from those days.

 

1.

After a few months I saw workers erecting a partitioned area in the middle of the room with special fans and air cleaners over it.

 

I asked my boss, "Is that going to be the non-smoking area?!"

 

"No," he laughed, "we read that smoke can damage computer drives, so from now on all computers will be in a non-smoking area..."

 

I said, "I've read that smoking is bad for people, too, so why don't they make a non-smoking area for us?"

 

"Ha, ha ha" he laughed, holding up his smoking cigarette with a wry look. Then he turned around and went back to work.

 

 

2.

There was a guy named John there who spoke Japanese. He sat next to two incredibly bad chainsmokers: his boss on his right, and a regular salaryman on his left.

 

These two smokers would each go through 4 packs per day, just sitting there smoking one ciggy after the other.

 

They were the kind of smokers you sometimes see in Japan who don't appear to be smoking aggressively or quickly, but at some point you notice they always have a ciggy right near their face, held as if it were tweezers, and they are always accompanied by a cloud of smoke.

 

If you ever see them WITHOUT a cigarette, such as in the elevator or train, it seems very strange, almost like they are naked.

 

They were the kind of smokers who'd hold the ciggy just near their lips all day, and on every breathe-in, move it slowly into the mouth...and repeat this all day, on every breath. I'm confident in saying that these guys probably only took 50-100 breaths per day that were not cigarette puffs.

 

Well anyway. Now you know how bad this guy John's life was, sitting in between these two human ashtrays.

 

He routinely asked them to put out their cigarettes and they just laughed. He avoided his seat as much as he could, doing work at conference tables and in the little libarary on the 2nd floor.

 

Eventually his boss decided this was inappropriate. In front of everyone in a loud voice, he told John, "stop hiding from work...you need to be sitting in your seat unless I give you permission to get up. You can go to the bathroom but anywhere else you have to ask me..."

 

John replied in an equally loud voice that he was doing his work and his boss knew it, but that he couldn't stand sitting next to all the smoke, all day long.

 

His boss said, "that's another thing...stop complaining about other people and focus on your job!"

 

At this point John had had enough. He announced in a really loud voice, "Look, imagine if I sat next to you and farted all day long. I farted constantly from 8:45 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. And my farts were so bad, they make your eyes turn red and you start coughing and get a headache...when you go home at night, your clothes and hair stink of my farts...even your closet at home begins to smell like my farts... And the worst part of all is, my farts cause cancer. Would YOU want to sit next to me all day? Don't you have any concern for others around you? You are a drug addict, and the most selfish boss in the whole company!"

 

The boss had no answer to this, and actually cut down smoking for a couple of days, but soon it was back to normal.

 

John became a hero to the OLs and non-smokers and retains legendary status for this tirade.

 

A couple other amazing things about John.

 

He was dating the NHK Italian language lessons chick (this is before Dario and that other bug-eyed guy took over). She was truly hot.

 

Also, his dad was a university prof of anthropology, and John grew up in a small African village...the only little white boy around for hundreds of miles.

 

As fate would have it, the very minor dialect he learned there was the same as spoken by many of the Africans who were working in Roppongi.

 

One night he was walking along with some pals near Gas Panic when some Africans said something or the other about his date in their own language, and he answered them right back. Naturally they were shocked, and in the ensuing conversation/explanation it turned out they actually remembered playing with him as a boy in that small African village. "I lived in the hut near the big tree by the rushes, do you know it?" etc. etc.

 

Great stuff, legendary stuff.

 

Almost as amazing as me having dated Lucy Liu back in law school, eh?

 

[rach 1]

Poor John

[mikazooki 0]

it makes me smile to think ones life can be one long story, and badmigs, u do a good job of telling yours and your aquaintances.

[AET 0]

I work at a town office / school and so that pretty much Japanese but not a company. I see what I feel is a lot of waster time and unncessary practices going on here. I'd love to see what things are like in a big Japanese company.

[Wizz 11]

yeah nice story there bm.

[dancing_barefoot 0]

Resistance to taking holidays, even if you have them.

 

Resistance to going home when your contracted finish time arrives....must work at least an hour extra a day.

[xes 0]

All of the above and more. I want to escape the imprisonment of my Japanese company and looking for ways out

[MistaSparkle 0]

great story bm...

 

 

While smoking has been banned at my J company's office, last year was hell. There were designated smoking areas where most people went to smoke, but a certain few (including the guy sitting directly behind me) decided that he could chain smoke at his desk all day. I would leave work with a sore throat every day, and I got sick a few times (which I never do normally). I wanted to kill the little weasel. After complaining to my manager 3 or 4 times, he finally gave me the old "shoganai" and told me basically the offending party made alot of money for the company so he couldn't do anything. The guy got canned a month later anyway.

 

I don't know if this holds true for all J companies, but the management in my company is a bunch of pussies. They can't/won't control simple workplace issues, and when they want to fire someone, they don't. They just lower their salary, and wait for the person to leave themselves. I know that's the japanese non-confrontational way, but it's pretty spineless if you ask me.

[kintaro 0]

"shoganai" used to drive me mad...sooooo many things are shoganai that I finally got used to it. The cops in Japan seem to be the biggest 'shoganai' guys of all! Regular guy parked in a handicapped spot in front of a nursing home...eh, shoganai!

[MistaSparkle 0]

Shoganai is such BS.... people say it all the time, but what can you do? shoganai....

[oo 1]

I agree, but sometimes - just sometimes - something is "shoganai".

[MistaSparkle 0]

I don't know if any of you at J companies have seen this but theres a guy who left my company over a month ago, and he still shows up for work everyday to hang out in the office and surf the net.