Today marks my one week countdown until I am no longer a teacher!
Hurray for me! No more teaching English! Hopefully forever!
Starting Monday June 23rd I will be the Junior IT staff member of a major international law firm’s Tokyo office. Hurray!
It took a while for everything to fall into place… they left me hanging for about 4 weeks… but finally last week Monday I had my last interview and they offered me the job! Of course I accepted and the next day I gave my notice at school. I figured I’ve give them 2 weeks and then some… just to be a nice guy. Plus, I wanted to start working at my new job on a Monday. It just makes things smoother that way.
I can’t wait for the 23rd. This last week and a half of teaching has been so boring… Even worse than usual since I know I don’t have to be here much longer. And to top it all off… next week… my last week, will be busier than usual. More teachers than normal have asked me to teach with them. I really don’t understand what the point is… but I guess they think of it as their last chance to have someone do all the work for them…
I’ll miss the students… we’ve had some fun times. I’ll miss all the free time. I’ll miss the casual attire that I can get away with. But, I certainly won’t miss teaching…
4 WEEKS… 4 FUCKING WEEKS OF WAITING! And finally, I get a call from Panache! It seems the Managing Partner at the law firm has finally made his way back to Japan, and would like to have an interview with me early next week (most likely Monday afternoon).
I had originally thought that I’d have a new job (and be working at it) by June when that 2nd interview went so well. But, due to strange circumstances I was left to suffer on the edge of my seat for 4 whole weeks.
But, at least something good came out of it! This 3rd interview with the Partner should seal the deal. (Potentially, just the fact that the interview is scheduled means that the deal is already sealed… it means that the IT Manager wants me enough to waste the Managing Partner’s time… so as long as I don’t do something really really dumb or rude at this interview next week - I’M IN!!!)
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/25/
Gotta love Penny Arcade.
So, had the 2nd interview in Japanese with the law firm on Wednesday afternoon. It went well… I think… They Japanese help desk guy was impressed with my Japanese. The sample emails they had me look at were nothing difficult… They had me do some trivial tasks like check driver versions and memory size and stuff like that… nothing difficult.
The guys really made it seem like they wanted me and were ready to hire me. But I guess theres at least two more hoops I have to jump through. There’s a phone interview with the regional IT manager out of Singapore, and then an interview with the head partner for the Tokyo branch of the law firm… But, again, the guys made it sound like those interviews had less to do with the hiring process and were more just formalities to play along with. But, obviously they can’t give me a formal offer until all that is done… and if they don’t get back to me today about the phone interview, then it probably won’t be happening until after golden week. If they DO schedule the phone interview, then I’ll assume they do want me for real and I’ll assume I can start celebrating…
But, for now… all I can do is wait and hope…
Because I already told my school and the Board of Education that I’m not coming back after July… (but really it might be way sooner than July that I’m out of here). Because ALT programs like JET and the one I’m in have everyone re-contract at the end of February (a full 5 months before the current contract ends), and because I said “yes” at that time… evidently there won’t be anyone coming to replace me for 2008-2009… So once word spreads to all the rest of the teachers, I’ll probably be getting some dirty looks. I can’t wait to give them my 30 day notice… (if I get the chance to…).
I actually had been intending to NOT re-contract in February, but the wife thought it would be better to be safe and have this job here as a safety net…. but now the safety net is gone and I’ll just have to work harder to find a job (if this law firm thing doesn’t work out… but I hope it does… it looks really good! great people! good location! good hours! permanent! … this is all causing grey hairs! And I’m only 24!)
SO! Last week was a busy week. I had interviews at 3 different Personnel placement companies: Vision Consulting, Panache, and Robert Walters. All seem to be decent sources for bilingual IT jobs in Japan (at least they send me more leads than Recruit has).
Monday was with Vision. They sent me some good leads, but when I got to the interview the guy (should I say his name?) was a real prick. He wasn’t paying attention to me. I was upfront about wanting an entry level position because I don’t have any formal experience, but he still belittled me. He asked me the same questions more than once… and he didn’t seem like he really knew about IT.
Wednesday was with Panache. Nice people. My advisor there is an 8 (out of 10 meaning she’s pretty cute… not anything to do with job performance. But on that note she was 100% better than the guy at Vision.). They had contacted me by email and phone and already had a job lined up for me to interview for. I had to skip through a bunch of the normal registration processes and actually moved my interview with them up from Thursday to wednesday to give room to the company I’d be interviewing with … which ended up happening last Friday at 4 (but I’ll come back to that).
Friday at 6pm, I met with a Robert Walters agent. We found out quickly that we have a mutual friend and the interview was relaxed and smooth. One thing I have to say about this company… NICE OFFICE! And the reception girl was pretty hot too… (I should be focusing on jobs… especially since I’m married… but the stress of job hunting seems to make me notice other women more… or maybe its just because I’m out and about seeing women around me other than just the students and teachers at my school…)
So back to the actual real job interview I had on Friday at 4… The company is an international law firm… not sure I should say where, but its a pretty prestegious company. Law offices in 25 countries and they do over a billion $ in business every year. The position is an entry level help desk job. No formal experience required… CCNA MCSE etc are helpful… most important seems to be an interest in IT and the ability to communicate in Japanese, especially in email.
The interview went great. The head of their 2 man IT dept at the Tokyo office (soon to be 3 when they hire someone) is actually taller than me… real nice guy. Seems like he’d be really pleasant to work for and he seems like he cares about his work and his employees. Minimum overtime, maximum educational exposure (its a small team so its easy to involve everyone in all aspects of the IT management I’ sure…), pay would be the same-ish as what I’m making now (and I wouldn’t ask for more, honestly…).
Now, I’ve been asked back for the Japanese version of the interview and an aptitude test…. TODAY at 4pm. So… hopefully I can pull this off. I get nervous just thinking about it… because I do have confidence in my day to day conversational Japanese, and I know I’d be ok if someone sent me an email asking for computer help in Japanese, but I don’t know how well I’ll be able to handle a conversation about IT stuff in Japanese. Sure, a few weeks on the job and I’d get to brush up real good! But, at first? Coming from a ZERO it exposure job where I teach English? I wish I had joined the computer club here at my highschool sooner…
Anywho… I hope I can get this job and finally start being useful! Maybe by the beginning of June I’ll have a new job!
I was searching for a nice animated .gif of Link from the legend of zelda when he’s invincible… (haven’t found it yet… but I know it exsists… I used to have it as my AIM buddy icon). Anywho… I stumbled on this blog a guy is writing trying to review all of the NES games… He and his wife? girlfriend? play each game for 30 minutes, he writes a review, pretty simple. But his reviews are really good and really funny, especially when a game sucks. They are evidently working through all the ones they have (currently over 250 it seems) in alphabetical order to be fair to all the sucky games in between the major ones we all know and love.
Here’s the link: 10-Yard Fight
enjoy … I hope its ok to just randomly plug someone elses blog on mine…
A few weeks ago I finally broke down and signed up with a Recruit Agent. I’ve passed my CCNA certification and I had been signed up with Recruit’s regular job search site through yahoo.
I guess the Recruit Agent people go through the job candidates on Recruit Next once in a while too, because a guy contacted me saying that with my experience (next to none?), drive (got a little…), and career goals that I should sign up with him and have the Recruit Agents help me find a job.
So, I did… had a 3 hour interview with a guy, talked about what I’ve done in the past, what I want to do in the future, how I’m studying to try and get there… (whole interview in Japanese, but evidently I could have done it in English, so he says). He tells me my Japanese is more than good enough to work an IT job and that I should list myself as having 上級 (top level) Japanese on my resume, great…super. Good thing I decided to stop studying for the first level on the JLPT.
He also said that keigo won’t be a problem (something I was really worried about) and that if I can communicate as well as I did during the interview with him, that I would be A-OK during a job interview. He also said that my lack of real experience wouldn’t be a problem as many companies are looking to hire 第二卒 (second graduation?… like the point where you finally realize what job you’re meant to do and go change you career) people and they don’t expect those people to have any experience, just drive and a desire to learn. Plus, the fact that I’ve been proactive and have been studying to get some certifications on my own should impress.
Now I just have to pluck up the courage to actually apply and start leaving my ALT job behind… I really hate being an ALT… and I really want a new job. But, its scary!
After 9 months of not posting anything. I feel compelled to start writing here again… why?
Apple.
I’m getting really annoyed by them shoving Safari down my throat through the Apple Software Update service. If I wanted Safari, I’d go download it. You guys are getting as bad as Microsoft! I’m already forced to use IE for sites that don’t (for some DUMB reason) support Firefox (or times when I want to login to two different email accounts from the same provider… when is someone going to come up with a solution for that on Firefox? Some kind of cookie splitting or something…?)
Theres no option for disabling the Safari download in the Apple Software Update service and next week or maybe even tomorrow, my computer (and all the others I have iTunes installed on) will ask me once again if I want to install software that I’ve said time and again that I don’t want…
… And I was almost about to give in and buy an iPod…
…iTunes pissed me off lately too by somehow deciding to change my music genres from English into Japanese when I play a song… so now half of my music is Rock/Classic Rock etc… and the other half is ロック・クラシックロック 等 and its really pissing me off… Why the change? Did I ask it to fuck with my music? NO! Same with the default folder management that I didn’t know about when I first installed iTunes about two years ago… I still have music that now belongs to no artist and no album all just jumbled up in one folder because iTunes wasn’t smart enough to read the folder names to get Artist and Album titles… Winamp was smart enough… but now that software is bloated and buggy too. (and has a “pro” version. What is this world coming to?
So I always get this feeling that something isn’t quite real about the world… Just strange feelings, strange things happening… The most common thing is stuff like this:
Yesterday I was watching “Friends” dvds with my wife over dinner and Chandler and Ross are helping Joey prepare for an audition to be a game show host. One of the questions in the game show is “what is triskaidekaphobia?” answer: fear of the number 13.
then today I check my mail and in the news and quote banner i see this:
Dictionary.com Word of the Day - triskaidekaphobia: fear of the number 13.
What are the odds of that? Stuff like that is ALWAYS HAPPENING! I learn some new word or hear about some thing that i didn’t know before and then it always pops up somewhere really unexpected and really eerie.
It makes me feel like my whole world is just in my mind and as my mind invents new words for my world then they decide to appear within the world… and I’m really just some accident victim lying in a coma somewhere or something. Which would be really sad because if this is all in my head, why am I not cooler?
Anyone else have weird stuff like that happen to them? Or am I the only crazy one?
I read somewhere (and I think many people have said it) that the first key to success in life is to do a job you enjoy… I’ve always instinctively known that which is why I did tech theatre stuff as a part time job during college instead of finding a job that paid more than minimum wage….
But you have to factor in the money variable at some point, and I did when I came back from studying abroad in Japan. (except I think my life calculator was a little broken at the time, but no matter).
I gave up on theatre as a profession after almost 7 years of putting my heart and soul into it because I realized that the chances of it adequately paying off my student loans were slim-to-none. Although I spent so much time on it (and now I kind of feel it was a waste of time. All but for the great memories and great experiences and the fact that its the one thing that really brought me out of my shell socially… so I have to be thankful for that).
In any case… the time comes again for me to give up on something and take a new, hopefully better direction:
When I decided to focus on Japanese, I didn’t have a very idea of what kinds of jobs I could do with my yet undeveloped language skills. I thought that translating or interpreting were really the only things available to people like me. I’ve been working as teacher using my spare time to study and get more proficient. But as I researched the field more, I realized that if I wanted to translate the types of things that I would find interesting (technical documents/IT related), I would need to have experience in the IT world AS WELL AS Japanese skills.
Take the next logical step and look for IT jobs in Japan… and I realized (with the help of some friends [Darin to be specific]) that I could work as IT professional in Japan if only I had some education in those fields as well.
So I’ve been looking at different IT careers and trying to find out what would fit me best. I’ve been teaching myself Visual C++ for the last month and its going well, but it still didn’t fit with the whole “do what you enjoy” motif. So I thought more about my overall personal experience and interests with computers:
I like to fix things and have lots of experience with repair and upkeep of friends’ and family members’ computers.
I like to help people. I don’t want to be tied to a desk… I want my job to require a bit of moving and physical work… sitting in the same chair all damn day would kill me.
Lots of experience with every platform of Windows from 3.1 all the way up to Vista now (not including server editions, especially 2003, but how different can it possibly be?) I’m learning linux at the moment.
And I love to learn about and tinker with new hardware.
Compute above statements, carry the 1, divide by amount of extra education it would take and you get:
“network administrator”: The closest job I can think of at the moment to all this.
so thats my new plan. Hopefully this one works out well… I don’t know a whole lot about what I need to get a job like this. But hopefully theres a little bit of demand for it. The other option would be a help-desk kind of situation… but then I’m tied to a desk and a phone…. but I guess I could get used to it.
All I know about the network admin job so far is that getting CCNA (and eventually CCNP) certification might be a good idea. Anyone else have some bright ideas or suggestions?