WORKING IN JAPAN: PT. 30
My first day off sick
This morning I was one street over from the dispatch office when I called in sick. For a few reasons, I couldn’t face it and went home. I’m tired from doing five shifts a week with no consecutive days off, and today would have been my second in a row with a trainer. I prefer to do the job alone.
‘Sorry but I can’t come in. I’m sick.’
‘In what way are you sick?’ said Harry, one of the managers, on the other end of the line.
‘Nausea. I didn’t feel right yesterday either. Perhaps it’s heatstroke. I’ll take care in future but, at the moment, I’m not able to come in.’
‘OK. Please go to the doctor.’
‘Thanks. Bye.’
I had no intention of going to the doctor on my newly acquired day off. If they ask me tomorrow, I decided, I’ll tell them I fell asleep and woke up after the clinic closed. Besides, today’s goal was to be away from other people, not meet a bunch of new ones.
On the subject of human relations, sometimes I think about companies and offices and workplaces and coworkers with a kind of queasy wonder. Employment can certainly shove an odd crowd of strangers into your life, randos who you wouldn’t be friends with and who aren’t your flesh and blood either. They’re people you are forced to associate with, almost daily, but who you can’t tell to fuck off. That’s so weird when you think about it: coerced high-contact acquaintanceships with people you can’t tell to get lost.
Have a spouse and kids? You can yell at them.
Family? You can take a break.
Friends? You can dump these.
And so on…
In life, almost every social connection is something you chose or you can leave, but coworkers are a different beast. Of course, you can quit your job but then your savings will run low and you’ll have to get another, at which point a fresh set of pre-chosen people will be dropped through the thin paper of your sanity and you’ll be back where you started. Basically, if you need to buy food, you’ll need to spend time with, and treat with contrived respect, a few dozen arbitrary somebodies who are normally either stressed or bored.
Not quite every job is like that, though, one example being mine. I’m a cleaner/janitor at train stations, and, unless I’m being trained at a new location, I earn my wages unsupervised. Rarely does anyone check up on me and, when they do, it’s a cursory conversation that lasts as long as having your temperature taken. When I’m learning the ropes at a new station, though, they put me with a trainer for three days…
Training, for me, is torture.
I’ve become so accustomed to living and working alone (like I said, most of the time I’m unsupervised) that I am comprehensively depleted by even seven hours with another person who has the authority to tell me what to do. However nice the instructor may be, they make me feel like a maimed and angry giant wasp has been nailed to my forehead with its stinger in my mouth. Each one of their words is a bullet of shit through my daydreams and if they stand under a metre away it’s like they put their head up my bum.
I don’t need three whole days to learn a new station. I need one, or two at most. All the tasks are the same in each facility, only with the steps, elevators and vending machines in different places. They could show me the ropes for one shift and I’d be good to go, but I guess the company has to make sure. I’d love it if there was a ‘new station quiz’ after day one and if you answered correctly you could clean it alone from the following morning.
Yesterday was day one of training at the stations this blog calls Birds’ Nest and Shoebox, today was meant to be the second learning session, and tomorrow was scheduled to be the final and third. I’m only hoping they don’t add on another day of accompanied labour on Saturday to make up for my calling in sick, because I would absolutely adore the opportunity to, once again, get left the fuck alone.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Despite the content and emotionally intense tone of this blog post, I do actually like people. I like my friends, who I have chosen and who chose me, and my family, with whom I share an unconditional bond. I love to spend time with others in the context of this more natural type of relationship, but not the stiff and manufactured groupings that occur when some dude makes a work schedule.
In any case, the reason I think I’ll last as a cleaner is that it allows me to operate in solitude. Apart from the odd time getting shown around a station I haven’t seen before, it’s me and my broom, or me and my cloths, or me and my garbage cart only.
Tomorrow’s training will be with Flint, a chilled out guy about my age, so it shouldn’t be bad. If I can get through that, and possibly Saturday, next week I’m back to being a one man show.
And the last time I was with him, Flint let me do everything alone so he could devote his efforts to mopping up a bunch of bird shit that was pissing him off. Hopefully there will be bird shit everywhere tomorrow and the same thing will happen again.
The next part of this series is here.
And the previous instalment, Part 29, is here.