Another day, and once again I felt exhausted.
Early in the morning, the language school sent the students an email announcing that it had adjusted the class times. Everyone was asked to log in to the school system and check the correct class assignment again, so that we would be able to arrive on time when school began tomorrow.
Today I was finally able to log in to the school’s self-study system as well, and I did a few short exercises. My God—even with N5 questions, I seemed to be getting one thing after another wrong.
In the morning, I got back in touch with two foreigners living in Japan whom I had met at last night’s networking event. One of them was Indian; within only a few exchanges, he kept referring me to people he knew. I was rather grateful for his enthusiasm.
The other was a Norwegian engineer I had struck up a conversation with. He may well have been surprised that, after being approached, he also found someone actively trying to connect him with work.
It reminded me of a similar networking event I once attended in Taiwan, where I met a remarkable man who would not stop telling me how many insiders he knew. He claimed that he made his own money through stock trading, wanted me to lend him my bank account so he could trade funds through it, and said he would leave a hundred million for me, among other things.
The WeChat contact printed on the business card he left me turned out to belong to someone else. That “someone else” genuinely was an employee of the company named on the card.
But when I checked with that “someone else,” he confirmed that their company had no founder by the name printed on the card.
What a fascinating sort of fraudster…
And in rooms filled with so-called “investors,” the chances of running into a swindler seem not to be small either?
Because I knew that my spoken Japanese was not good enough for business conversations, I was also searching very actively for a Japanese interpreter.
I did not really know the going rate, so I skimmed through other people’s comments and looked at the prices they had proposed.
But sometimes, even when you look at what other people are offering, their prices are not necessarily right either.
On message boards in Germany, for instance, I often saw businesses propose rates that were nowhere near the generally accepted market price.
Businesses that offered those rates would usually be torn to pieces by students living in Germany.
So today I asked the interpreter I interviewed whether the rate I had posted online was actually appropriate.
The interpreter, who described herself as very experienced, gave me a rough figure. It differed somewhat from the number I had posted online.
I thought to myself: are people in Japan really all that much more reserved? A discrepancy of this size would have got me roasted alive on a message board for people in Germany.
In communities for people living in Japan, does everyone simply ignore you in unison at most?
Close to midnight, I had another video meeting with the company that would soon become my former employer.
My soon-to-be former employer was rather unprofessionally prepared. Perhaps they felt that, since the separation was already inevitable, there was no need to give it too much attention.
In any case, the ultimatum was this: the company was shifting the centre of its operations, and business was not looking particularly optimistic. If, once my parental leave ended, I could not relocate along with the company, they would have no choice but to hand me my dismissal letter on the day I returned to work.
There are, in fact, many questions of German employment rights and personnel law entangled in all of this.
By coincidence, only today I had listened to a YouTuber who reports on the German automotive industry explain the methods now being used to shed employees, and the calculations behind them.
German mechanical engineering is facing much the same situation. In the end, if a company can make its employees uncomfortable enough to force them to leave of their own accord, that is the company’s greatest victory.
The truth is, there is very little future in working for an industry already deep in decline.
Two years ago, I already knew that my separation from the company was inevitable.
Having to carve out a path of my own was only ever a matter of time as well.
But this is what people with Tiantong in the Life Palace are like: after being proactive for two or three days, they already start to feel terribly tired 🤪
In any case, do everything one can, and leave the rest to fate.
Tomorrow, I formally begin attending language school.
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