01-18

01-18 – 11:04pm

Sent money home today. Yet another adventure in highly sensitive information being mangled by language deficiencies. I now have absolutely no idea whether the 4000yen service fee charged by SMBC is added to the amount sent or subtracted from it at the time of transmission, and the additional fee that was mentioned thusly reducing my total amount sent is I think the receiving bank’s fee, which I was already aware of, but, neither is clear. So, I could either end up sending ~$150 after fees to the US which would be ideal, or $125 which would be less than ideal. Actually, ideally I would be sending $400 home like I really need to, but it appears as if this month that’s not possibly.

The bureaucracy in this country is at best suffocating. I go to the bank and stand in line only to have my number called, another number issued, and wait again. When I get up the second time, I get to announce the purpose of my stay, have the teller call over someone who speaks broken English, plod my way through some paperwork, make a typo, start the whole damned thing over again, and then wait for another little while as they look over the document, check it with their peers, then superiors, consult a dictionary for how to explain the next step, take a Nova lesson to get some extra practice, take a vote on who will speak to me, rock paper scissors to decide the tie, then tell me that there are some fees I should be aware of, point out some numbers, explain the numbers to me in no particularly useful way (starting to understand my point yet?), remind me that any inaccuracies, which are clearly not the fault of a failure to check information in my presence due to the potentially offensive nature of such an action, will incur additional fees which will be deducted from somewhere, depending on the day, year of the Chinese zodiac, planetary alignment, and the availability of necessary documents which much be completed in triplicate.

Bryan’s Welsh roommate Rob as it turns out will be the next addition to the Mallage staff. This is good. He’ll be working Friday-Tuesday, werd. That’ll mean that for a while, at least until he’s kids trained, that I will be taking on days full of kids while he teaches the lessons. He covers both Allen and my days off, that way they don’t have to keep bringing in help work.