As you may have noticed, I havent been able to include any photos in any of my posts of late. I have another blog which Im contributing to more regularly and if anything exciting happens to me in the week I would stick a photo of it on there. Now I like to think people who do read my blog, if I were to draw a pie chart, would comprise of 50 percent people who I have made good friends with over the year, 20 percent people who are interested in Japanese culture, another 10 percent are people who genuinely are lost in Japan and searching for emergency services online and the final part I`d probably draw like an actual pie because I would probably have gotten a bored by that point .
For the 20 percent who want to hear about Japan a little more, I thought in this post Id write a little about my experience working with GEOS, an English conversation school that I worked for for about 6 years. Im pretty sure most teachers have funny stories about it because compared to working in the UK, it was a little bizarre. In my last posting I talked about going to the doctors so I thought a tie in with that would be timely.
When I worked for GEOS we had to have yearly check ups. I used to go to this doctor whose grandchildren I taught. He was nice enough, but his English was a little off at times. I remember when I went into the X-ray room I was told to "inflame my lungs", which was baffling to say the least. The other thing that always annoyed me was the kind of grading system they used to explain your healthiness to you. There were 3 levels in all. The first was "healthy and able to work", the second was "unhealthy but able to work" and the third was "unhealth and unable to work" and there was nothing in between. Those were the only results we received.
One year my results were "unhealthy and unable to work" and I was a little shocked. I hadnt a clue if that meant unhealthy and getting worse or unhealthy but will get better soon so I requested more information from GEOS head office, where my full results used to be sent. I talked with the head office member in charge and she said she would find out for me and within a week she got back to me to say that there was protein in my pee, which meant I was tired or exhausted. I didnt enquire further as she told me it wasnt a problem.
Now one of my good friends was working in head office at that time. He worked for an entirely different department but he gave me a call for some reason and the first thing he said to me was "Hi Owain. How`s your yellow pee?" It must have been discussed all around the office. Now surely thats private information!! I don`t know if thats just GEOS or if it`s all Japanese companies, but it felt like an only in Japan moment for me.
One thing I did want to mention to the mumster. We`ve managed to get the picture up on the wall now. Its in a safe spot from children and people can see it easily.
 


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