Occupied

I am satisfied with my job. I have never before said this without stipulations attached. Not long ago, i had an hour train ride ahead of me. I hadn't my Ipod, nor my keitai. All I had was my tiny notebook with "Mother's Milk" printed on the cover. This is the place where I catalog any useful Japanese words and terms that I pick up along my way. But on that train day, I sacrificed a few pages in attempt to satisfy my curiosity. How many jobs have I had throughout my years?

The answer? Thirty-two.

Since it struck me strangely that my jobs outnumbered my years in this wicked world, I thought it appropriate to cross off things like "door-to-door pizza coupon seller" and "middle-school softball game snackbar attendant". I can admit that I found gratification in being a preschool teacher, though not any more than I felt with serving cocktails to bowlers or slices of pizza to drunk college kids. Believe me, I enjoyed cataloguing textbooks, and unjamming the Xerox machines...i swear, i really did. I also enjoyed re-shelving stacks of pornography behind the curtains of Captain Video, as well as regulating the medication for ADHD children and shadowing retarded kids through their lunchtime activities.
I am not being at all facetious, I truly found the monotony enjoyable. That is, until I met the world of insurance. My god, is data entry, answering phones, and making sales boring. Like sunburn on yr palms, want to murder your mother, torturous. I loved the girls I worked with, yes, but if there was any job transition that has bettered my life in the utmost possible way...it was leaving RV Nuccio and teaching in Japan.

However, here in Japan, my co-workers may have their quirks, but they are ultimately good, happy, respectable people. It makes me want to be good, happy and respectable.
But that's just one part of it...coworkers. In any job, there's more to it than just who you work with, there's the bureacracy. The Man. The place where your check comes from, the policymakers who determine your sick pay, vacation time, insurance plan, work-place rules and regulations, etc. In the past, that is usually where I have had problems. I've worked in enough corporations, and in enough sales-types of jobs to know that usually the entry-level suckers get the shaft. It's the rule of the world, right? The American way? Well, I'm not sure if I plan to return to the American Way.
Working as a teacher, or a teacher's aide, or whatever, in the American school system su-uucks. I doubt that I need to delve any deeper in proving my last statement. It's a given. However, in Japan, and as I can imagine, most other first-world countries besides the US , education is not last on the monetary funding list. Teaching is considered a reputable occupation, and funded accordingly. Though I am aware of the influence my country has on Japan and thus, the existence of my employment position here, I am also aware of the differences in the overall management of the system. This organization for which I work is the most organized, and well-balanced entity that I have ever been controlled by....including my parents.
This program has so many support systems that I actually feel like it is too much. Seriously, I can't believe that I can even say this, but I might even go down on the records saying that I think this program is overly funded as well as overly supplied with overly-capable staff. After all my years of being a wage-earning citizen of the world, I must admit that right now, I have it good. And for maybe the first time, I feel the urge to work to my full potential. Perhaps that's just an admission of my lazy, American attitude....that because I'm treated nicely in the workplace, I actually feel like doing work. To tell you the truth, it feels good.