Yep, a Freshness Burger for lunch is how I started my work day.  We only had an afternoon appointment so I indulged and slept until 9, then slowly got going, and suddenly found myself with too little time for a real lunch.  I liked the burger and the service way better than the one at KINTEX (see here and here), but disliked that everyone else in there seemed to smoke and I couldn’t flee outside because of the rain.  Maybe next time the bright yellow ashtrays should tip me off… 

We drove out to a university still in Tokyo but a good 30 kilometers from our distributor’s office, in the hilly countryside.  This gave us plenty of time to talk – and proved to me they have a pretty good grapevine going.  He already knew Janet’s age from someone I hadn’t even told, and he asked a bit about our plans.  Later I asked how long he’d been with his current company and he said only since last August – he’d been a riding instructor at a horseback riding club before.  I commented that there must have been plenty of girls to meet there.  He asked me about my hobbies and I included church in my list, which I don’t usually because it seems weird to call it a hobby, but it made him remark that his girlfriend was a Christian, which is rather rare in Japan.  He’d met her at his former job as a riding instructor at a horse riding club, which he said without any reference to my previous comment, but it explained his chuckle then.  I asked him if he ate horse sashimi, which he affirmed, pronouncing it tasty; his girlfriend, he said, refused to eat it.  He put that down to their different approach to horses: for him, part of the job, for her, a cute pet. 

The customer visit went well in the sense that I was able to solve a number of problems, although reading the funky manual would have solved the worst of them (i.e. not calibrating the system) and trying the advice we’d sent by e-mail would have eliminated another.  At any rate, I think they now know a bit more, though I don’t know for sure that they ever change the feedback loop settings, which means that a) the default settings aren’t too bad, b) they’re not liable to experiment with the system, and c) I’m still not sure they completely understand the basics of the system.  What I’m learning on this job is that if I ever end up operating complex instrumentation I’ll be willing to pay for a training course.  And that I’ll use the computer suited to the job, not a MacBook running two operating systems at once. 

Something – I’m not sure what – reminded me again of an ad I saw yesterday on the train.  It was for a fitness studio and showed a slender woman playing darts, except that instead of throwing the usual way – sideways, two-legged stance – she extended one leg back and upwards, counterbalancing her torso which she leaned forward until her torso and arm bridged about half the distance between the distance marker and the board.  Of course her throw from five feet hit the bull’s eye.  All I know is that even with fitness training I’d rather not balance about precariously with a pointy object in my hand…

On my way home today I noticed a white, low-slung Porsche Carrera coming my way and was surprised by the driver being a young woman.  I always thought that all the reasons for young people going into debt to purchase a fast, expensive, good-looking car favored males: going fast, crazy acceleration, curvy design, petrolhead mystique, impressing girls… and I have a hard time imagining that emancipation has caught up with Japanese girls enough that they’re already trying to pick up jocks with fast cars.  (Don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate a beautiful car, very much so, but I also keenly appreciate the price tag.) 

I finished my day with a avocado-and-egg Subway sandwich – the vendor insisted on giving me the point card even when I said I lived in Switzerland – and a salty chocolate I found at the convenience store.  If their idea was making a person thirsty for more, I can’t say it worked.