Sweatin and a swingin

I’m in Japan this week with Boil. Needless to say, the Boil needs lancing. It’s very difficult traveling with anyone on a trip like this, let alone traveling with someone that you don’t get along with. We’re both working hard to play nice. Since we don’t speak that much Japanese, other than the basic “toilet, beer, hotel”, we tend to stick together. It’s not uncommon to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner together. Plus work together. Fly together, sit on trains together. Together, together, together…..It’s a huge change up for me since I usually work by myself in the lab or work by myself at customer sites. It’s a lot of “togetherness”.

The work/sleep schedule I keep when in Japan is shifted by about 17 hours from my standard schedule, so I spend much of the first week trying to figure out what planet I’m on. (Mind you, visiting Japan is like visiting another planet.)

Tomorrow I’ll finish up at our manufacturing facility and head for our corporate office in Tokyo.

The corporate office puts me on edge almost instantly. Rows and rows of desks, sans walls. I can deal with that. I can deal with the minimal personal space, like none. While I can feel the entire office staff watching me, yet not watching me, to see what I’m doing, I can shake it off. I love the long hikes to the toilet, they break up the monotony of my day. Long meetings that don’t seem to have a conclusive starting/ending or point are what I live for! (It’s a cultural thing I know, the meetings that is. The Japanese have typically resolved the reason for having a meeting in the first place prior to the start of the meeting. The meeting itself is (generally) a nice show of support and respect and agreement of all parties. I say, cancel the meeting if you’ve already made a decision. While canceling the meeting may not add any actual length to my life, it will certainly feel like it does.)

What I can’t handle is the heat and humidity in the office. Mind you, I work for one of the largest companies in the WORLD. The heat and humidity are, to me, unbearable. I am not productive when I have sweat rolling down my forearms and pooling on my desk. I am even less productive when I have sweat rolling down my chest and collecting at the top of my trousers. What I am though, is really, really annoyed. Really annoyed, really peeved, and really short tempered when I’m in the Tokyo office.

So it’s a given that on Friday I’m going to be really sweaty and angry. I have a meeting scheduled with a new marketing guy, who just started with the company, to review with him the customer list of who he wants to visit in the US on his trip. The new guy neglected to ask if anyone wanted him to visit, or wanted his help. I just went through this exact scenario with the new guys boss last month. It was insane. A manager was coming to the US to visit potential customers. Of which, there’s almost none. My group was supposed to fill up an entire week of meetings for this guy with live customers. It was close to a complete cluster

So now I have another guy, wanting the same thing that his manager wanted.

I’d say that the day has real potential.

Sleep where art thou?

Today is my 68th day on the road (AKA, sleeping in a hotel) this year.

To say that I sleep in hotels is a bit of a misnomer. I cat nap in hotels. I often awaken to listen to my next door neighbors:

a) Ignore their alarm clocks
b) Ignore their telephone alarms
c) Turn their TV’s so loud that the water in my water bottle on my night stand oscillates.
d) Have sex.
e) Use the toilet.
f) Party. (I stay in corporate hotels, why would anyone want to have a party here?)

The only time I sleep through the night is when I'm at home.