管理人
The manager of my apartment building spends a lot of time working on pictures and editing random stuff he's scanned in. The bizarre thing is that he uses what I can only guess is some kind of tracing software that appears to be roughly akin to using MS Paint for everything.
I just came back from watching him touch a black and white scan for ten minutes. He's probably been at it for an hour or two and will be at it for a while yet. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I can do the same thing in Photoshop in about five seconds.
But this sort of thing is really common in Japan. As an example, if you go to the mall, there will sometimes be three people at one entrance controlling traffic. They stand there and do nothing for the better part of the day, then hold up their arms for a little bit every time someone goes by on a bike or by foot. On the way to school every morning, I see a guy named Yamada. His job is to stand at the front gate to the school, keep track of visitors, and answer questions about where and when things are. This is fairly normal, right? Well, except that they have three people in the little guard shack he's in.
In addition to him, there are two or three crossing guards at the nearby intersections, and three more people who just stand at corners whose jobs I cannot fathom. But this kind of thing is normal for them.
I just came back from watching him touch a black and white scan for ten minutes. He's probably been at it for an hour or two and will be at it for a while yet. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I can do the same thing in Photoshop in about five seconds.
But this sort of thing is really common in Japan. As an example, if you go to the mall, there will sometimes be three people at one entrance controlling traffic. They stand there and do nothing for the better part of the day, then hold up their arms for a little bit every time someone goes by on a bike or by foot. On the way to school every morning, I see a guy named Yamada. His job is to stand at the front gate to the school, keep track of visitors, and answer questions about where and when things are. This is fairly normal, right? Well, except that they have three people in the little guard shack he's in.
In addition to him, there are two or three crossing guards at the nearby intersections, and three more people who just stand at corners whose jobs I cannot fathom. But this kind of thing is normal for them.
posted by William at
6/14/2008 09:09:00 AM
4 Comments:
Bizarre, to say the least. It makes me think of greeters at Wal-mart, only in trios and stationed all over the country. Strange.
Well, these guys actually do do something. When the traffic is really bad, hey'll wander out into traffic and let a few cars out of the parking lot every so often so they don't get stuck in, trying to get out. They also stop bicyclsts and pedestrians from going across a driveway when there's a car that's trying to get in, and vice versa.
They're not entirely useless, but I don't see the need for three at one driveway, handling an average of about a car a minute.
Well, it is the Japanese, so perhaps they want to work in groups, and two isn't enough of a group. I dunno...I'm just being tiredly silly I guess. It would be nice to have people helping with traffic in some larger areas here like Seattle and such.
That sounds like a really boring job, even if they are useful every once in a while.
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