On The Importance of Literacy

Stay it school kids and don’t forget to learn all you can about this emerging technology called “computers”.

Today: rainy but that’s cool, I like rain.  This city is still pretty in the rain and how it was built to handle it.  Apparently snow is a different story here.  First dusting and six people die in the morning commute and everything is fine again.  In a society where walking and biking are the primary forms of locomotion after the subway, it can make for some interesting situations I am told.

Breakfast was at a place that wasn’t a buffet.  The only place here where your coupons for breakfast of the four that isn’t a well-appointed and disguised food trough for guests.  It was also a place that served traditional Japanese breakfast.  It was delicious and I can only assume by the ingredients, healthy.  Another bonus was that it was just beyond the Garden Lounge from yesterday so I had a pretty amazing view of an uninhabited garden.

Work was nothing but calm.  There was a meeting that started at 8:00am (an hour early for the office) and I needed to help someone just before.  So I made it, even in the rain and breakfast, by about 7:40.  I got the meeting going with not much work, finished working on the one user’s computer I needed to and then waited for others to start showing up.

It seems they finally realized that their IT support only had two more days in country because I was bouncing between the three offices constantly.  As soon as I would get one fixed and try to understand what the next issue was with a different user, the first would have a question.  Towards the end of the morning, I was having to fix “panics” involving printing when I knew it was just working (user changed the default to Microsoft OneNote) and basic usage questions for Outlook.

It is still cooking on the plate.

Lunch wasn’t until 1:00pm, but that was just as well as we went to the Kobe steak house just down the road and it can be incredibly busy between 11:30 and about 12:45.  Oishi kata desu!!  (Was very tasty).  So we drag ourselves back to the office through cold winds and wet sidewalks.  The steak place is maybe about a 45 second walk from the front doors of the office building so it wasn’t too long outside to feel cold.

The rest of the afternoon I felt like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation in the scene where he’s film the commercial and the assistant tells him that the director wants “more intensity” after going on a 20-second tirade.  One of the users in trying to understand Outlook was asking me questions that would be the equivalent of something like:  “I have two rock. One for moon, other in shoe.  How can I make ocean become rock for old way?”  Umm, OK.  I *can* help you, I just need to understand what you need.  So I got the bilingual person to assist and after, and I not kidding, an energetic, three-minute, back-and-forth conversation that had me thinking of ham, she explained what he wanted and about two minutes later I had him all set.

Thinking I was done, I head back to my desk to check on the situation where someone locked their account and we had to wait for the UK to wake up.  Yup, I’m dealing with friends and family in the Pacific  and Mountain time zones, co-workers in the Pacific, the international support team based in the East and the international server team contacts in the UK.  16, 15, 13, and 9 hours behind me, respectively.  Joy…  I didn’t get to enjoy myself too much with email as I was called back to answer some other issues about transferring contacts from Outlook Express [shudder] to Outlook.   Welcome to comma-seperated value address books.  I hope you didn’t have any commas in your addresses or comments or anything like that.  Oh and since it is basically a flat text file, just guess what happens to all those kanji characters when converted to text?  If you guessed it looks like ASCII up and barfed in a file, you’d be right.

After 6 again, I drag myself from the office for the penultimate time for this trip with a slight sense of sadness.  To feel better, I apply a copious amount of すし.  I’m sure there is a kanji for sushi, but that is how I know how to spell it now.  Walking around Akasaka-Mitsuke, I'm beginning to be able to read more.  Now I need to start learning what words mean.  Time to get a dictionary.

Tomorrow’s sojourn may be very brief or it may be a long night.  I may go to Akihabra again to stroll through the electronic nirvana some more.  I was way too tired Saturday night to enjoy it.  I’ll have to check the balance on my PASMO card to see if I have enough to get there and back.  They have Japanese language learner devices. I may look for one and see how it works.

Mata ne