As per every Thursday morning—this week’s complaint thread! Time to get anything off your chest that’s been bugging you or pissed you off.
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Rules are simple—you can complain/moan/winge about anything you like, small or big. It can be a personal issue or a general thing, except politics. It’s all about getting it off your chest. Remain civil and be nice to other commenters (even try to help).
27 comments
I wanted to see Dexter TV show and luckily found it on Amazon prime and signed up for it. But later found out that only Japanese audio version is available in Japan’s Amazon prime.
I absolutely hate prime now. Prime video experience on my android TV is absolutely awful compared to the Netflix app. Every click shows a loading spinner in Amazon and it wouldn’t respect my language setting. Everything is in Japanese 🙁
Economy is rough, tons of people getting fired in my company. Very worried about me and my team. Two people I worked with were let go yesterday out of nowhere. It was terrifying.
Hopefully I get to keep mine.
I don’t wanna leave bed. It’s cold!
The electricity bill for my 1DK was over 23’000 yen this month, and I get the feeling it’s going to be more next month.
I also made an effort to get an earlier train today, but it got cancelled, so I have to wait around the station for 20 minutes.
Thursday already, Tempus Fugit.
Following up from last week.
Good news is that working/translating at such a fine level of detail, I feel like I have gotten used to the original writers’ (it was definitely more than one) writing styles and idiosyncratic design/format decisions. There are still a few oddities to be discovered (images behind images, layered/obscured but not deleted for example, everyone’s favorite: “The fuck you manually spacing for, there’s a goddamn word wrap button, for fuck’s sake”, and the company’s recommended first pass auto-translate that uses a shitty locally produced proprietary algorithm that literally translates the exact same content *differently* from page to page, etc – supposed to “save time” but all it does is output trash and destroy formatting, especially relating to images/diagrams… which are the main focus… so, let’s manually copy/paste)…
Hang on, that was the good news. The bad news, the complaint? The cry for help?
Excel to PDF. Too easy… except for more format errors in the conversion process. And the discovery that all the internal linking within the original excel file that had to be done from scratch (that’s right, because the original Japanese version (excel) linked to a Japanese PDF of the same file that exists on a server that I don’t have permission to access). Totally not convoluted at all.
Oh yeah, the cry for help: does anyone have a method/know of software/have some macro, script, etc for preserving/converting internal excel links when converting to pdf? Or am I just fucked and going to have to burn through some overtime?
The ice has arrived and I hate it. I will never stop hating that Japanese people do approximately fuck all to clear away snow and the ice it inevitably turns into. I bought some ice spikes so that helps some, but for fuck’s goddamn sake. Everything is just a slippery fucking nightmare. You’d think at the *bare minimum* they’d at least put some fucking salt down in front of the station or on the platform, but nope. Just, “lol don’t slip. And if you do try not to be seriously injured”.
Just put down some fucking salt!
It’s getting time to think about starting seeds, but I’ve accumulated more stuff and will have to sacrifice something else to make space. I guess I could take out my bench and rack and replace it with a table. I wanted to buy grow lights to get better results this year but electricity bills… oof.
I announce to students again and again both orally (in Japanese) and in writing (in Japanese and in English) that they will need their user names and passwords for both the LMS and for the university computer network and that **I do not know and cannot find their university system user names or passwords or the LMS password.**
Nevertheless, every time there’s a test several students invariably ask me to tell them their university network user name, university network password, and LMS password.
Getting from Shiga to Kyoto yesterday was an ordeal. Basically no public transportation between the two running yesterday morning because of the snow. Absolute shitshow.
First world problem though because the only reason I’m complaining is that I went from the whole day of sightseeing in Kyoto I planned to a half day haha
EDIT: oh yeah, damn Japanese apartments with no goddamned insulation. Not even bothering to put food in the fridge right now because my kitchen is so effing cold.
Had an “I’ve been living here too long” moment at work the other day.
My coworker was translating a document and asked be if 10万ダウンロード could be written as “100k DL”
And I honestly couldn’t remember if “DL” would be something other English speakers would understand. Like, Ive seen it often on Japanese documents but I was totally blanking on if its and abbreviation native speakers would use or not.
This fucking train doesnt have the air cooler on and Im fucking sweating like a pig on the way to work. This isnt even the “low energy” car!
“Anti-fog coating” my ass….
Good news: I’m now experienced in driving a 50cc through snow and ice.
Bad news: I’m driving a 50cc through snow and ice.
No hot water this morning, pipes have frozen up, first time in 13 years.
I finally get around to organising a dinner with friends and I get sick. The universe, if it cared at all about me, just doesn’t want me to have a social life – I had to skip fully half of my engagements last year because I got sick a day or two before each one.
Daughter is sleeping better now but still wakes up 3-5 times during the night crying. Running on fumes at work.
Work project is a nightmare. Inherited a JavaScript project with an mightmare database. The nesting would make a bird blush, no documents have master data and the value names were written by a non-native, non-engineer so… Have fun guessing what you need and where!
So I have hot water in my bathroom and washing machine.
Cold water in my kitchen sink, but only barest dribble of hot water.
No water coming out of my face washing/miscellaneous hygiene sink which is next to kitchen sink.
Did my pipes freeze or something?
The non-working lines are all within about 3 feet of each other.
The feels like temp on Tuesday night in Okinawa was 1 fucking degree. Hell naw, I ain’t about that life
Samui ne.
Complaining both about the weather and how shallow 99% of the conversations I have with Japanese are. The only stimulating socialization I can find is with other foreigners. The few that aren’t weird….
Actually another one, I literally was not home from about December 22 through the end of the year. When I left, I actually unplugged everything other than my fridge, just to be safe. How the fuck was my electric bill still so high? I wasn’t home for almost a full *third* of the month!
Edit to add because I remembered another thing: yesterday I ran into a former student. They called out to me so I went over to talk for a moment. I asked him how he was, he just said “I’m [name]!” I told him I remembered (actually not a lie because he has a very easy to remember kirakira name). I asked if he was cold. He turned to his friend and asked how to say samui in English. His friend couldn’t remember either. I just switched to full Japanese at that point. It’s always good to get a reminder of how utterly pointless “teaching” English is by running into an old student and having them remember approximately fuck all.
Living in the country side so you’re always competing for the same girls with your foreign friends 🙁
Did people get even ruder when rushing on to the trains? Usually people rush on to the trains to grab a seat, but these days the bumping and pushing seems to have increased. I’ve even seen people slide in to a seat while someone is already in the motion of sitting down. This morning really topped it all when an old lady pushed over a young girl trying to sit down, just so she could grab the seat.
Got corona and couldn’t attend my third and final interview for an amazing job opportunity. They can’t reschedule.
Also had an on the side teaching job at guys company every week. Told him I finally got corona and he fired me, cause he can’t put his company at risk. I freaking hate corona.
Huge truck woke me up at the crack of dawn trying to rev out of a parking full of snow
I got an email from the Tax Agency last Friday notifying me of a message I had to log in to read. Tried to access the smartphone etax but the phone did that thing where you press on a link and it goes to the App Store for the app you already have. It got frustrating trying to get it to work properly, so I decided to use my PC.
I was then reminded that the web version flat out does not support “non-Japanese operating systems”. Meaning, they specifically blocked it out. Never mind no other site has this problem and I haven’t seen 文字化け in years and when I did see it it’s a very easy fix on websites. I got around this before by changing my browser language but I wasn’t in the mood today so I went to the windows version of etax.
Etax for windows opened up (on my English language OS. See, NTA? It does work), but it needed to install updates, and each update needed to be installed separately, button clicks and all. After finally logging in I opened up the inbox to find the message, inviting me to participate in a survey.
So worth it.
Work-wise, the past 1.5 years have been death by a thousand cuts. I regret not taking steps to try something different earlier.