External observations

Sometimes in the course of my primary job, I am an executive trying to decide the best thing to do with a whole lotta money and the financial future of myself and my partners. Sometimes I am an financial analyst trying to reflect current reality and predict the future using a spreadsheet… sometimes I’m a tactical strategist trying to figure out what we gotta do today to get to where we  need to be tomorrow.

Other things I get great enjoyment out of is the tactical process of finding new properties to procure. It’s like hunting – find a good field and wait patiently for a doe to come by. Sometimes you try baiting the field. Either way, it’s an adrenalin rush. Deal analysis on the front end to determine profitability on the back end, in the form of “Can we keep this house’s front door or not?”

These are jobs I enjoy immensely and get a great deal of personal satisfaction out of. I love that aspect of the job, and wouldn’t trade it for anything. It’s the stimulation that keeps me coming back for more, the drug that fuels my desire to stay in this business come hell or high water. If I had to guess, I think my partners would feel largely the same way.

Sometimes, however, I am faced with parts of the job I don’t enjoy nearly as much. Things that have to be done because something went wrong, or that we’re suddenly faced with a situation where things can’t work the way they normally work. Generally speaking, it means that our contractor has failed to do what he’s supposed to do.

On those days, I’m a day laborer. Put on your duds and crawl into an attic to toss out fiberglass insulation. Hand tools to the more technically skilled partner. Crawl around in a crawl space laying out plastic vapor barriers. To put it mildly, this part of the job doth sucketh mightily.

This past week we got to play day laborer. We put in about a 13 hour day in order to wrap up a punch list because we really didn’t think our contractor could hack getting it done by the end of the week. Lunch at Chic-fil-a, dinner at waffle house… and believe me, we were ready for breakfast at Waffle House if the need arose. Enjoyable? Not hardly. By the end of the day, we were bruised, dirty, and exhausted… however, the job was done and the ball was back out of our court.

But, that’s not what I’m here to write about today. Instead, I’m gonna write about the people I saw at Chic-fil-a.

Chic-fil-a is one of the better fast-food establishments available in this little corner of the world. The food is quick, hot, fairly inexpensive, and not generally a cause of massive indigestion. As such, it draws in a variety of people during lunch hour.

As my partner in crime and I sat at a back booth eating our chicken sandwiches, looking for all the world like typical laborers, we had the leisurely opportunity to observe two folks at other tables. The first was a guy that, to me, screamed ‘industrial salesman’… he was wearing a carefully constructed uniform – jeans, ball cap, work boots, polo shirt. Working on a laptop. He’d be foreman material if not for the blackberry and the fact that he was too clean to be a jobsite employee. No, this guy was a road warrior. I’ve worked with these folks… traveling 5 days a week, selling construction material straight to jobsites. He’s probably got the breakfast buffet at every hotel and motel in his sales area memorized and knows the staff by first name. Probably a college graduate with some quasi-professional major like general Business or maybe Sales.

The second lunchtime denizen of the restaurant looked to me like an office lady. She spent her whole lunch period on her aging Palmpilot, alternating between business discussions and talking to her friends about weekend plans – “I haven’t had anything to look forward to in a long time, this weekend will be great.” she exclaimed into her cell phone. I’ve worked with this type as well. Her idea of an exciting time is probably going to chic-fil-a and returning with milkshakes for the other citizens of cubeville. Trading adventure for job she can tell herself is reliable and a paycheck she fools herself into believing is steady as the sun. Probably a HS graduate working her way through evening courses at a local college.

Of course, I may have been completely wrong. The man may have been a corporate CEO who makes a bajillion dollars a year but enjoys dressing in jeans and eating at fast food joints. The woman may be a world traveler who likes to wear corporate dayjob attire in between Alaska and Madrid. Who knows. It’s strictly conjecture on my part based on what I could observe.

Heck, they probably looked at me and thought, with no small amount of pity, that I was an partially skilled rube working menial labor who hasn’t cracked a text book in his life and probably views a calculator with disdain and distrust. I certainly looked the part that day.

All this simply made me reflect that while looks may be deceiving, they may also be dead-on. That day, I was a laborer. My ability to program a computer was less useful to me than my ability to drive a nail with a hammer. But the next day I’d be something different, and chances are they’d be doing the same thing. Not right, not wrong. Simply a matter of what people are willing to give up in order to gain things they think are important. I value my ability to do a lot of different tasks and make a living based on my wits and the thickness of the seat of my pants. They probably value perceived stability and the reliability of a regular set of tasks and a normalized schedule.

But, then and there, in that moment… we were all just eating chicken sandwiches.

I think at this point we’ve all seen the footage, heard the announcers, the pundits, and the left-wing speakers for whom Obama can do no wrong.

The problem is that, as usual, they’re generally ignorant and talking out their asses. What happened between Akihito, his wife, and Obama as they greeted each other was, in fact, fairly complex and bungled on a number of levels.

Watching the video, Akihito was on the verge of laughing. Yes, that look on his face was “Old Japanese man” for “ROFLMAO.” The problem was that Obama bowed very much… incorrectly. Bowing a little bit, like maybe 5 or 10 degrees, would have been fine. He bowed while hand shaking (big no-no), and bowed so low he was indicating that he was ready to assume butler duties. (The lower the bow, the lower the status of the bower in relation to the person being bowed to)

Akihito and his wife bowed back, but very slightly. In effect, he was signaling that he was, in fact, inferior to Akihito and his wife.

Now, I’ll grant you that Obama himself is probably clueless about formal Japanese bowing etiquette. The gesture was, I’m sure, made out of an attempt to pay homage to the culture – at least, I hope so.

The problem is that it shows a stunning failure to plan and/or execute on the part of the administration. The president has handlers to coach him on etiquette “when in Rome”… so either they failed to do their job, or he ignored them, or didn’t bother to tell them that he was planning to bow.

The average Joe really isn’t going to particularly understand what happened there. They will, in typical American fashion, view it as a black and white issue. The bow – a way to respect another culture… or as the far the far-right wing is likely to see it – a submission to another head of state out of hand because El Presidente clearly is either trying to submit America or intentionally make America look bad.

Those reactions count, and the administration should have considered how the act would look to Joe average. Perception is reality.

But consider what the average Watanabe saw – an American president bowing so low to Akihito that he looked like he was ready to maybe shine some shoes or pour him his afternoon tea. Yes, it was that bad. Obama was virtually at a 70 or 80 degree angle. Compare that to maybe the 5 degrees Akihito gave. To say the least, Obama embarrassed himself and he embarrassed Akihito with his stunning lack of grace. No matter how it was intended, that was how it looked to any adult Japanese person watching the meeting.

Bowing and trying to be “in Rome, as the Romans” is an act that may be debated on its own, I could see positive and negative connotations to it. The problem is that it was a terribly bungled execution.

For a completely reversed view, look up how Putin greeted Akihito. Just Google “Putin Akihito” … Note the symmetry of the handshake. Perfect photo op and graceful entry that required neither dignitary to feel uncomfortable or give up anything to the other, or to the other’s culture.

I am blessed in that I have a wife who enjoys cooking. I cook from time to time, but my aspirations rarely go beyond making enormous quantities of chili, giant pots of apple butter, or things that can most definitely be deemed “Bachelor food” – like spaghetti with sausage and way too much garlic.

We buy a lot of our food in bulk. To wit: I currently have 4lb of cream cheese in my freezer, bought at Sam’s Club for a little under $7. My humble goal in life is to someday have a chest freezer – lord knows I could use the space. Our freezer is constantly crammed to the gills with containers of frozen chicken broth, beef, bacon, bread, and other assorted staples.

The reason for this is simple: Buying food in bulk is a lot cheaper than buying it in small quantities. After shopping, we spend a lot of time repackaging bulk containers into smaller, more useful quantities and shoving things into the freezer, spare bedrooms, closets, and under coffee tables until it all fits. Sure, it’s a pain in the butt. However, we also eat off a food budget that would seem highly improbable for a couple of generation Y-ers living together. Still, the system works and I expect that we could weather out a zombie invasion for at least a few weeks before running out of beans and rice.

I spent about 3 years in college studying Japanese. After college, I spent about a year working at a Japanese company where I was the only real English speaker in the office aside from the administrative assistant who worked the front desk.

Since then, it’s been a challenge to maintain a sharp edge with the language. I didn’t do JET, nor did I live in Japan (Although at times I felt like I was living in Japan while working for the Japanese company.)

With that in mind, it’s always a treat when I get the chance to interact with other folks with whom I can share a conversation – Albeit conversations mired with stuttered, incomplete sentences.

Almost as fun as the conversations themselves are the inevitable reflections on what it is like to live in another culture, work in another culture, or play in another culture. I’ve generally come to the conclusion that those of us who choose to pursue Japan as a study (linguistic, cultural, you name it) must have a somewhat masochistic nature. I’ve never met anyone who has genuinely said, “I went to Japan and was accepted with open arms and open hearts by my co-workers. I would go back and do it forevermore if I could.”

Instead, there’s a certain arm’s-length nostalgia. Everyone I talk to went to Japan for their own reasons, and they all fled back from it for their own reasons. Richer, perhaps, from the experience… But still content to be where they are.