The Company is FAIL: A Short Rant

Alrighty, to quote a famous sailor man: “I’ve hads all I can stands and I can’t stands no more!” I’ve said this often of The Company and they have yet to prove me wrong: If there is anything I have come to expect of them is their ability to fail at the most menial of tasks especially of said task is of great importance to me. Take two instances from this week.



1) Now I admit that the origins of this incident are my fault. Having just begun classes anew I had forgotten the key to the school. This is not cause for panic, though, as we always have a backup key in the school mailbox located somewhere outside the building or, as it was today, in the lobby grouping of boxes for the apartment complex that houses the classroom. Again please allow me to remind you that our classrooms are not in schools. They are located pretty much anywhere the Company can stick a class. Remember the clinic incident? See! Though above a clinic would be the worst place to have a kids classroom I’d rank inside an apartment complex as second. The Japanese have to be extremely tolerant, I tells ya', because if a gaggle of screaming kids were to settle next door to me a few hours every day four times a week I’d be raising such a stink it’d make rotten chicken innards smell like a fresh bouquet of gardenias. So, I find myself standing there in the lobby looking at about 100 mailboxes. Now, because The Company sends trainees and other teachers that are not the usual instructor (team teaches would be an example) to these classes on a regular basis you would think the mailboxes would be marked in some way to indicate that this is where you would want to look for the spare key. Not always or, more often than naught, it’s in Japanese. And so it was today, me looking at 100 mailboxes with no idea where to begin in my search for the right one. What’s behind door #1? Of course there is no number on the classroom to match the numbers on the mailboxes. Grrrrrr! We are given a sheet of paper at the start of our tenures with mailbox codes on them (this is a handy tool if said codes are updated). Most of the time I can just reach in but these were not the sort that would allow a large enough opening for my slender pianist hands. I started with the first one. Code didn’t work. This wasn’t the class. Moved on to the second. Nope. Well, I probably would have blown an hour on these boxes if a wonderful woman hadn’t have appeared to lend me her cellphone to call for help. We have a branch over at head office called Classroom Support. They used to be called Native Support. I think they changed the name because they realized they were not very supportive. The trend would continue here. So many times I’ve called these folks to either have issues be totally ignored or have runaround answers. I will admit, there are one of two guys there that are great help but overall Classroom Support is about as supportive as a broken training bra. Why did I expect today to be any different? Would you believe that they didn’t know the number to the school, if the mailbox code had been changed or the mailbox numbers? When somebody finally did dig up some information it turned out to be wrong. The woman in the lobby would match the Japanese on the mailbox with the company name and that would solve the problem allowing me to dispatch of the flummoxed support line.



2) The above is small beans next to what came next. As you know my time here is coming to a close. Just under two months to go now. According to my Company guide I should have been sent some forms that would be used to tie up all the loose ends that come with leaving the country and the Company. This should have arrived at the end of December but with the holidays I gave them some leeway. When the end of this week arrived and still no sign of any forms I started to grow concerned. I want my leaving here to run smoothly and now my head was filled with times when the Company had dropped the ball, MANY balls. This would be a dropped BOWLING ball. I call up my supervisor and explain my plight. He confirms I should have been sent the forms by now. These forms are pretty damn important. Without them I cannot cancel my apartment utilities, I cannot schedule a day to move out and, most importantly, I cannot get my final two months of pay and employment bonus. ARRRRRGH!!!! My supervisor tells me to get on the horn with human resources. I hang up, give HR a buzz to be told that this is not their job and, in fact, this all falls into the lap of the Area Manager and, get this, the fucking SUPERVISOR! They tell me I got a deadline of the first week of February to get all this to them. Now I’m on a clock. I hang up with HR and get back on the born with the supervisor who passed me off when it was his job in the first place. Now, this dude is new to the area but he’s being doing this supervisor gig for over a year. He’s even done employee move outs! I should have realized something was up when he was pretty nonchalant with me scheduling my move out date. I tell him he’s got a job and I’m pretty firm in my tone. I don’t want that bowling ball to drop. It would cause a lot, A LOT of damage if it did. He’s a bit aghast that he now has to gather these forms and says he’ll have to call HR about it and it will have to wait until next week. Didn’t I just get off the phone with them? Didn’t they just tell me what you have to do? There are certain grounds for a human being to decapitate another human being. This is one of those times. He leaves me hanging with no information on when I can expect these forms and I tell him he can expect a lot of harassment in the coming days regarding them. It ends at that. I hang up and realize that at least three other teachers in my group are in the same FAIL BOAT as I am with these forms. I drop a few emails and rally the troops. Now there are three of us pushing this guy into the fire. I trust all will work out in the end but couldn’t this place just make one thing, ONE THING, easy on yours truly?



Now that the rant is over allow me to footnote this by saying that, overall, The Company hasn’t been THAT bad…well, maybe I’m being lenient. In a class of retarded kids they would be the one who could write cursive. Yeah, that’s a good metaphor.