Brace for Impact
It's been nearly a year since my last post, as usual.
I've been living in Tokyo for a few months now.
It is insane. All I can think about is work and work is terrible.
So I'm quitting. I'll go back to Oita (where I lived last year) and scrounge up some part-time jobs.
The feeling of personal failure is only matched by the worrying.
I took this job, at an IT company my "friend" co-owns, on a list of conditions:
1. The company will provide housing and pay rent in full.
2. The company will pay a generous salary.
3. The company will schedule my work within reasonable, full-time hours.
4. I will be able to make and save money.
5. I will have fun living in one of the most amazing cities in the world.
I was even asked to write my own contract to guarantee the first three of these points. I wrote it, had it professionally translated into Japanese, submitted it for signing.... and didn't see it again for three months.
During those first three months, each of those three promises were broken--sequentially. I ended up paying not only the full rent of my apartment, but all the deposits (there's a special real estate custom in japan where you give a 'key money' deposit of six to ten months rent to the landlord--a deposit which is never returned and must be paid up front). My salary has never been documented since I came to Tokyo, such that I don't know exactly how much I'm getting paid each month or what's being deducted for what, but It looks like about half of what I was promised and it's not enough to live here. I have worked days and nights without sleep several times; although the typical day is uneventful, I still work at least 40 hours a week and sometimes more, much much more, like when I was left behind in America to do the work of three people and I didn't know if they'd ever get me a ticket home and I slept on the floor in a warehouse where I was installing equipment and collapsed from exhaustion.......
I think I'll give a little more detail about that America fiasco, as that was when I first though it was time to quit. It was December last year. We, two of my bosses and I (I have three co-workers of boss rank, but in a japanese company everyone who's been in there longer than you is "sempai" and in all practicality your boss, so in a way I have about six bosses) went to California to install equipment in a Colocation warehouse (a place that houses stacks of servers for whatever purpose you need them). The trip started out lighthearted and fun, with the first two days just driving around LA carefree.
I had the responsibility of negotiating rack space and bandwidth for our servers which were being air-shipped a few days behind us for immediate installation and activation. We had already taken the first month's payment from our japanese customers and promised to be online in a few days. Everything was fine, although I'd had a little trouble with the American company asking too many questions (because salespeople these days don't know a thing about the products or services they sell) every time I made a request and for some reason the manager was never able to take calls at any time on any day.
Then I got the "long call" out side a gas station about three miles from the warehouse, where we were headed for a tour while we waited for our equipment. During the "long call" the salesperson I'd been talking to informed me that he had thoroughly misunderstood everything we'd been talking about over the past MONTH and that no work of any kind had been done on our order and it would now take two weeks to set up and more than that to process the billing and get our access rights set up. (This is the point where your mind should explode.) I stood there on the phone for nearly two hours talking to this salesperson and his boss on three-way while my bosses were in the car wondering why we weren't headed for the warehouse. Everything went back to zero on their end: no rack space for servers, no bandwidth to get on line, no billing arrangements, no access rights, no soup for you. I managed to talk them into giving me whatever they had on hand, prepared or not, and they agreed to make allow access to one rack two days later while they prepared the other four we originally ordered. It was a nightmare, but all was not lost--yet.
We managed to get the one rack set up and twenty servers online within it, which is a really bad idea because the power requirements of twenty servers running at maximum capacity would be about double the amperage that rack can handle (someday, that circuit breaker will explode and catch on fire), but our customers in japan got impatient and pushed the date for all five racks to be online up another five days. After much apologizing my boss managed to get them to part of their order going online immediately and the rest within four days. Meanwhile, a plane landed in San Francisco carrying 70 some servers from japan with really bad paperwork that the Transport Security Administration of the Office of Homeland Security didn't much like.
While one of my bosses was working on that first rack, the other and I went to San Francisco to pick up our merchandise property (when importing/exporting, apparently it makes a big difference if it's "merchandise" or "property"). The clearing office took a look at our papers and said "Hmmm.... No." (You may detonate your mind once again at this point). It seems someone in Japan had written some preposterous nonsense on the documents like a Japanese company, with no American entity of any kind, was going to bring in nearly a half ton of electrical equipment to be used but neither sold nor bought in the United States. The major problem there is that if you want to import anything into the United States, you have to either be American or a wizard of great and mysterious powers. Luckily, I am American, but I've never registered myself as a company or an importer before, so we had to make a whole new pile of documents which took more than two hours.
The clearing office closes at 4:30pm; we arrived at 1:30 pm; at 3:30pm we had nearly completed the paperwork and the agent asked us for the documentation on our bond. To import large quantities of things, you must take out a bond covering the complete value of whatever it is which will be repaid to you in full once you pick up your things. The bond office was just a few blocks away and we had nearly an hour left, so we hustled on over and asked for the documentation, as quickly as possible. The lady running the bond office took one look at me at thought "Here is the slacker youth that is destroying the fabric of America, got my son addicted to crank, and ruined my marriage!" or something of the like and proceeded to treat me like a criminal and a child for the next 50 minutes. Yes 50 minutes, meaning when she finally finished accusing and patronizing we had only 5 minutes to get back to the clearing office, present our bond, and then call a shipping company to pick up our stuff at the airport. Running full speed through the street in Frisco, suicidal to say the least, we didn't make it (although we did survive.... somehow).*
This meant we'd have to come back tomorrow to clear our servers, and the overnight shipping arrangement we had would be canceled, and from whatever time we could manage to get our stuff cleared, it would take at least two days to transport the cargo. That's plus three days on our four day deadline. It took a day an a half to set up one rack, and we needed to set up four more. Don't do the math, just strap some dynamite to your skull. We went back to the warehouse and finished up the first rack, then to a hotel to sleep (once or twice we did manage to sleep.... we're about five days into the story now).
The next day was Saturday and the clearing office, like any good government office, was closed until Monday. The deadline was now entirely impossible. I hate to think of what kind of calls my boss got over the next two days, but I'm sure they were terrible. He managed to calm down the customer and get a few more days to work. One of my two bosses went back to japan at this point to take care of business here. Down to the two of us, we went back to the office on Monday and got the documents cleared--but wait--there's more! You have to clear your cargo twice in America. Once at the clearing office (run by the US Department of Commerce), and again at the customs office (run by the Office of Homeland Security). Eight years ago, I believe this was not so. So we gave all of the paperwork over to some tiny, obscure company's office on the second floor of the China Airlines building in the Cargo area (That's where everyone who imports anything into the US through San Francisco must go.... yeah really.)**
It took a few hours to process, but we managed to get the paperwork done (again) on the same day. We contacted the shipping company and got a truck to pick up our servers. At this point, I had to make a mad rush for the passenger area of San Francisco International Airport so my other boss could find a flight back to japan to make an urgent meeting to present some products to a major japanese supermarket company. It wasn't easy, and I couldn't believe it myself, but he found one no less than fifteen minutes after arrival at the airport. It was the last flight out too. Now I was alone. The very first executive decision I made, as I had been awake for nearly 36 hours at this point, was to sleep. I drove up to Coit Tower and found the best place to take a nap in all of San Francisco, or possibly the world, and slept like the dead.
The next two weeks were a living hell. The truck went to the wrong gate and was refused entry to the warehouse but I managed to find it and our servers. The other four racks never became available. The customer in japan finally canceled their order. My boss told me to keep working anyway and to cancel three of the racks which were still not available (weeks after ordering them). For a few days there was nothing I could do but sit at the hotel and wait. I called every hour on the hour about the second, and now last, rack we needed. No one answered my calls. Finally, I got the news from Tech Support (not the salespeople) that the next rack was ready, and I went in to investigate. In fact all four racks had suddenly become available, including the three we canceled, which weren't really canceled at all you see, because the inverse property of physics says that blah blah blalainrewhoijlkjf;a;weionf; *KABOOOM*
I started to set up the second rack and called to cancel other three several more times. My fifth call was answered, and the seventh got results. Then came the matter I thought would be of the least trouble to me: Setting up the computer network. It was a simple network really: one main router connected to twenty servers and another router which is also connected to sixteen servers. Something went wrong. Many things went wrong. Every time I connected the second router, the default route vanished and all the servers went offline. For the technically declined, and to save time, the second router said to me: Yo dawg! I heard you like to route so i put a route inside your route so you can route while you route! (but you can't route to the internet) WORD! The solution: I ended up connecting eight of the servers by 20 meter cables from the first router (in a different part of the warehouse) and bypassing the second router altogether. I managed to 'finish' the work by Christmas eve and spent Christmas flying over the pacific ocean. Then things got really bad.
The racks that I canceled didn't get canceled. The billing for them didn't get canceled either, and thousands of dollars were charged for products and service we never received. Since our Japanese customers had canceled their order we had no way to cover the costs. My boss (not either of the ones who went to the US but another, entirely different boss) decided that the solution was to freeze all internal accounting. That includes salaries. Nobody got paid a dime for a whole month. Unfortunately, I already had vacation plans for New Year and had already spent a good deal on them, which meant I spent the rest of the month eating white rice with powdered seasoning. I also spent the month on the phone with that company negotiating a refund. They wanted a new sales agreement from us, my boss wanted a new contract from them, they couldn't understand what in the world that meant for weeks, but finally I wrote it for them and they agreed to sign it if we signed their sales agreement, my boss threw in another wrench and asked for the refund by check rather than back to the original card it was charged to, we rewrote both their sales agreement and the contract and finally they won and we signed the sales agreement before they signed the contract and I got just a little more than half a month's salary for all of January and February. 3, 2, 1, Mindbomb!
In February my bosses, all three of them, went to the US to continue the work. The went without me, as I told them I never want to see that warehouse again as long as I live, but I still had the responsibility of negotiating rack space and bandwidth by phone. Meanwhile my bosses found a range of things to criticize me about concerning the work they left me alone to do, knowing I was inexperienced. Could I have done a better job? Yes. Why didn't I? I was under a lot of pressure to perform, working a schedule that nearly made the warehouse staff cry, under constant criticism, and doing the work of three people alone. Not to mention the constant negotiation.
Now one point that may not stand out in my ranting: it's all my fault. I said I had the responsibility to negotiate--my job is specifically to talk to companies and clients that speak English and secure reasonable terms with them and get results. So every problem, every single thing that went wrong in this situation, without exception, was my responsibility to resolve and therefore, my mistake. In Japanese business, there is no other way to think about it.
"So I do the only thing I can do, I go." - Babylon 5
You may have seen somewhere how Asian CEOs will resign in shame to take responsibility for something that happened in their company. That's kind of what I'll be doing.
The fact that I have made no money and had almost no fun is only a small part of why I want to quit this company.
I've been living in Tokyo for a few months now.
It is insane. All I can think about is work and work is terrible.
So I'm quitting. I'll go back to Oita (where I lived last year) and scrounge up some part-time jobs.
The feeling of personal failure is only matched by the worrying.
I took this job, at an IT company my "friend" co-owns, on a list of conditions:
1. The company will provide housing and pay rent in full.
2. The company will pay a generous salary.
3. The company will schedule my work within reasonable, full-time hours.
4. I will be able to make and save money.
5. I will have fun living in one of the most amazing cities in the world.
I was even asked to write my own contract to guarantee the first three of these points. I wrote it, had it professionally translated into Japanese, submitted it for signing.... and didn't see it again for three months.
During those first three months, each of those three promises were broken--sequentially. I ended up paying not only the full rent of my apartment, but all the deposits (there's a special real estate custom in japan where you give a 'key money' deposit of six to ten months rent to the landlord--a deposit which is never returned and must be paid up front). My salary has never been documented since I came to Tokyo, such that I don't know exactly how much I'm getting paid each month or what's being deducted for what, but It looks like about half of what I was promised and it's not enough to live here. I have worked days and nights without sleep several times; although the typical day is uneventful, I still work at least 40 hours a week and sometimes more, much much more, like when I was left behind in America to do the work of three people and I didn't know if they'd ever get me a ticket home and I slept on the floor in a warehouse where I was installing equipment and collapsed from exhaustion.......
I think I'll give a little more detail about that America fiasco, as that was when I first though it was time to quit. It was December last year. We, two of my bosses and I (I have three co-workers of boss rank, but in a japanese company everyone who's been in there longer than you is "sempai" and in all practicality your boss, so in a way I have about six bosses) went to California to install equipment in a Colocation warehouse (a place that houses stacks of servers for whatever purpose you need them). The trip started out lighthearted and fun, with the first two days just driving around LA carefree.
I had the responsibility of negotiating rack space and bandwidth for our servers which were being air-shipped a few days behind us for immediate installation and activation. We had already taken the first month's payment from our japanese customers and promised to be online in a few days. Everything was fine, although I'd had a little trouble with the American company asking too many questions (because salespeople these days don't know a thing about the products or services they sell) every time I made a request and for some reason the manager was never able to take calls at any time on any day.
Then I got the "long call" out side a gas station about three miles from the warehouse, where we were headed for a tour while we waited for our equipment. During the "long call" the salesperson I'd been talking to informed me that he had thoroughly misunderstood everything we'd been talking about over the past MONTH and that no work of any kind had been done on our order and it would now take two weeks to set up and more than that to process the billing and get our access rights set up. (This is the point where your mind should explode.) I stood there on the phone for nearly two hours talking to this salesperson and his boss on three-way while my bosses were in the car wondering why we weren't headed for the warehouse. Everything went back to zero on their end: no rack space for servers, no bandwidth to get on line, no billing arrangements, no access rights, no soup for you. I managed to talk them into giving me whatever they had on hand, prepared or not, and they agreed to make allow access to one rack two days later while they prepared the other four we originally ordered. It was a nightmare, but all was not lost--yet.
We managed to get the one rack set up and twenty servers online within it, which is a really bad idea because the power requirements of twenty servers running at maximum capacity would be about double the amperage that rack can handle (someday, that circuit breaker will explode and catch on fire), but our customers in japan got impatient and pushed the date for all five racks to be online up another five days. After much apologizing my boss managed to get them to part of their order going online immediately and the rest within four days. Meanwhile, a plane landed in San Francisco carrying 70 some servers from japan with really bad paperwork that the Transport Security Administration of the Office of Homeland Security didn't much like.
While one of my bosses was working on that first rack, the other and I went to San Francisco to pick up our merchandise property (when importing/exporting, apparently it makes a big difference if it's "merchandise" or "property"). The clearing office took a look at our papers and said "Hmmm.... No." (You may detonate your mind once again at this point). It seems someone in Japan had written some preposterous nonsense on the documents like a Japanese company, with no American entity of any kind, was going to bring in nearly a half ton of electrical equipment to be used but neither sold nor bought in the United States. The major problem there is that if you want to import anything into the United States, you have to either be American or a wizard of great and mysterious powers. Luckily, I am American, but I've never registered myself as a company or an importer before, so we had to make a whole new pile of documents which took more than two hours.
The clearing office closes at 4:30pm; we arrived at 1:30 pm; at 3:30pm we had nearly completed the paperwork and the agent asked us for the documentation on our bond. To import large quantities of things, you must take out a bond covering the complete value of whatever it is which will be repaid to you in full once you pick up your things. The bond office was just a few blocks away and we had nearly an hour left, so we hustled on over and asked for the documentation, as quickly as possible. The lady running the bond office took one look at me at thought "Here is the slacker youth that is destroying the fabric of America, got my son addicted to crank, and ruined my marriage!" or something of the like and proceeded to treat me like a criminal and a child for the next 50 minutes. Yes 50 minutes, meaning when she finally finished accusing and patronizing we had only 5 minutes to get back to the clearing office, present our bond, and then call a shipping company to pick up our stuff at the airport. Running full speed through the street in Frisco, suicidal to say the least, we didn't make it (although we did survive.... somehow).*
This meant we'd have to come back tomorrow to clear our servers, and the overnight shipping arrangement we had would be canceled, and from whatever time we could manage to get our stuff cleared, it would take at least two days to transport the cargo. That's plus three days on our four day deadline. It took a day an a half to set up one rack, and we needed to set up four more. Don't do the math, just strap some dynamite to your skull. We went back to the warehouse and finished up the first rack, then to a hotel to sleep (once or twice we did manage to sleep.... we're about five days into the story now).
The next day was Saturday and the clearing office, like any good government office, was closed until Monday. The deadline was now entirely impossible. I hate to think of what kind of calls my boss got over the next two days, but I'm sure they were terrible. He managed to calm down the customer and get a few more days to work. One of my two bosses went back to japan at this point to take care of business here. Down to the two of us, we went back to the office on Monday and got the documents cleared--but wait--there's more! You have to clear your cargo twice in America. Once at the clearing office (run by the US Department of Commerce), and again at the customs office (run by the Office of Homeland Security). Eight years ago, I believe this was not so. So we gave all of the paperwork over to some tiny, obscure company's office on the second floor of the China Airlines building in the Cargo area (That's where everyone who imports anything into the US through San Francisco must go.... yeah really.)**
It took a few hours to process, but we managed to get the paperwork done (again) on the same day. We contacted the shipping company and got a truck to pick up our servers. At this point, I had to make a mad rush for the passenger area of San Francisco International Airport so my other boss could find a flight back to japan to make an urgent meeting to present some products to a major japanese supermarket company. It wasn't easy, and I couldn't believe it myself, but he found one no less than fifteen minutes after arrival at the airport. It was the last flight out too. Now I was alone. The very first executive decision I made, as I had been awake for nearly 36 hours at this point, was to sleep. I drove up to Coit Tower and found the best place to take a nap in all of San Francisco, or possibly the world, and slept like the dead.
The next two weeks were a living hell. The truck went to the wrong gate and was refused entry to the warehouse but I managed to find it and our servers. The other four racks never became available. The customer in japan finally canceled their order. My boss told me to keep working anyway and to cancel three of the racks which were still not available (weeks after ordering them). For a few days there was nothing I could do but sit at the hotel and wait. I called every hour on the hour about the second, and now last, rack we needed. No one answered my calls. Finally, I got the news from Tech Support (not the salespeople) that the next rack was ready, and I went in to investigate. In fact all four racks had suddenly become available, including the three we canceled, which weren't really canceled at all you see, because the inverse property of physics says that blah blah blalainrewhoijlkjf;a;weionf; *KABOOOM*
I started to set up the second rack and called to cancel other three several more times. My fifth call was answered, and the seventh got results. Then came the matter I thought would be of the least trouble to me: Setting up the computer network. It was a simple network really: one main router connected to twenty servers and another router which is also connected to sixteen servers. Something went wrong. Many things went wrong. Every time I connected the second router, the default route vanished and all the servers went offline. For the technically declined, and to save time, the second router said to me: Yo dawg! I heard you like to route so i put a route inside your route so you can route while you route! (but you can't route to the internet) WORD! The solution: I ended up connecting eight of the servers by 20 meter cables from the first router (in a different part of the warehouse) and bypassing the second router altogether. I managed to 'finish' the work by Christmas eve and spent Christmas flying over the pacific ocean. Then things got really bad.
The racks that I canceled didn't get canceled. The billing for them didn't get canceled either, and thousands of dollars were charged for products and service we never received. Since our Japanese customers had canceled their order we had no way to cover the costs. My boss (not either of the ones who went to the US but another, entirely different boss) decided that the solution was to freeze all internal accounting. That includes salaries. Nobody got paid a dime for a whole month. Unfortunately, I already had vacation plans for New Year and had already spent a good deal on them, which meant I spent the rest of the month eating white rice with powdered seasoning. I also spent the month on the phone with that company negotiating a refund. They wanted a new sales agreement from us, my boss wanted a new contract from them, they couldn't understand what in the world that meant for weeks, but finally I wrote it for them and they agreed to sign it if we signed their sales agreement, my boss threw in another wrench and asked for the refund by check rather than back to the original card it was charged to, we rewrote both their sales agreement and the contract and finally they won and we signed the sales agreement before they signed the contract and I got just a little more than half a month's salary for all of January and February. 3, 2, 1, Mindbomb!
In February my bosses, all three of them, went to the US to continue the work. The went without me, as I told them I never want to see that warehouse again as long as I live, but I still had the responsibility of negotiating rack space and bandwidth by phone. Meanwhile my bosses found a range of things to criticize me about concerning the work they left me alone to do, knowing I was inexperienced. Could I have done a better job? Yes. Why didn't I? I was under a lot of pressure to perform, working a schedule that nearly made the warehouse staff cry, under constant criticism, and doing the work of three people alone. Not to mention the constant negotiation.
Now one point that may not stand out in my ranting: it's all my fault. I said I had the responsibility to negotiate--my job is specifically to talk to companies and clients that speak English and secure reasonable terms with them and get results. So every problem, every single thing that went wrong in this situation, without exception, was my responsibility to resolve and therefore, my mistake. In Japanese business, there is no other way to think about it.
"So I do the only thing I can do, I go." - Babylon 5
You may have seen somewhere how Asian CEOs will resign in shame to take responsibility for something that happened in their company. That's kind of what I'll be doing.
The fact that I have made no money and had almost no fun is only a small part of why I want to quit this company.