In any case, I had withdrawn my application. Well, they let me reinstate it in time for the new deadline. Today was my phone interview. I'll know next week if they, too, have decided to crush my dreams of teaching children English (okay, so it's not really a DREAM of mine, but whatever) or have granted me the chance to make a fool of myself in a face-to-face interview.
I felt like sharing because I like cataloging my failures in the public eye. Makes me feel more human somehow.
Teaching children English is fun, and surprisingly rewarding. It's the rest of job that tends to get you - just the red tape and natural inadequacy of the education system if you're lucky, but include your bosses and co-workers in there too if you're unlucky. The kids themselves tend to be pretty decent beings to work with. So it's not hard to understand teaching English as a DREAM.
The DL = the public eye? I don't think there's enough of us for that.
And really, living in Japan has it's sucky moments, too.
Take today, for instance! I have a horrible cold/flu (my first real illness since moving to this country, so it's having fun with my ill-adjusted immune system) and the Japanese employment system really doesn't like sick days.
Taking a sick day is frowned upon with the level of reputation-smearing that causes translators to use phrases like 'dishonored his ancestors'. In my case, it 'dishonors the reputation of all the foreigners who live here'.
So I tried taking a sick day once. My boss ended up coming to my house after I phoned in, bringing along the foreigner with the best translating skills. I basically was trapped in my house with these two people while they gave me an alternatingly stern and polite lecture about the value of 'suffering' and going to work. They also politely suggested that I never do it again. And if I ever -was- sick enough to miss work, that I had better go to the hospital. It was explained to me that if I miss work, but don't go to the hospital, it seems as if I wasn't really sick, just faking it to get out of work. ..and THAT reflects badly on all of the other foreigners, not just me.
So I tried going to the hospital. I had to get someone else (who didn't speak English) to drive me because I didn't know where the hospital was. Once we arrived, we waited in the hospital for about 3 hours in a room full of sick people waiting for my five-minute, high-speed doctor's visit where I couldn't communicate with her and she couldn't communicate with me. It was the most stressful experience I've ever had in Japan... and all I wanted to do was be at home, asleep, where I would have gotten better.
So instead, now I'm work, sick with the Japanese Death Flu or whatever, snot dripping onto my keyboard and only barely able to speak (you know, the main part of my -teaching job-). I'm probably infecting at least half of my co-workers, my students, and (hopefully) my bosses. I can't see how this is a good system in any way, but I don't want another lecture about 'dishonoring the gaijin', so I'll sit at work and be unproductive and ineffective as a teacher until I recover.
This is the Japanese way.
It completely explains why the country is as germ-o-phobic and clean as it is, though. They don't take care of sick people, they laugh at them as they suffer. Just as I expect Zenny to do with this post.
-Djinn
