Waiting…

...for any new post ever to appear again on this blog, perhaps (apologies); for a job offer; to see Shiho again after next Tuesday when, finally, definitely and without any further delay, she moves to Tokyo.
School life trundles along reliably enough. This September, like the last, has been pretty quiet with exams being done and festivals to prepare for. Unlike last year, though, this time round I have one eye fixed on March/April, what job I’m likely to be doing then, and where. Shiho (or Shiho Must Be Obeyed as I sometimes call her – not to her face, mind) has already found us an apartment in Shinjuku, west Tokyo – quite a flashy neighbourhood and with a rent to match, but should be bearable between us. She’s also doing 99% of the purchasing and moving-in, which I feel a bit guilty about but which can’t be helped: she wants nice things for the apartment; she has savings and I don’t; her new job pays twice my salary, and aside from the odd day I can’t take holidays during term-time. All I can do, I remind myself, is to save all the cash I can, get as good a job as I can and make myself useful as soon as I move in.
On the subject of work, had my first-ever Skype interview on Monday, with a recruitment consultancy that had rather surprisingly contacted me despite the fact that I have no experience in recruitment and hadn’t applied to them for a job. Never trust a job ad that doesn’t give a figure for the base salary, folks. ‘If you were hitting your targets you could be making 5 million yen in your first year’, apparently; that’s over 40 grand – so why are you interviewing someone like me? Surely all your consultants would have to be prised out of the office with a crowbar if they were making that kind of money? Why are you telling me what the head consultant makes in bonuses? Why do I care? You mention ‘There is a base salary’, so, y’know, between friends, how much actually is it? ‘If you’re the kind of person who’s thinking about base salaries, maybe you should stick to an easy job like teaching’ – tells me 3 things: (a) you’ve never tried teaching, (b) the base salary makes peanuts look like lunch at the Ritz, (c) there’s no way in hell I want to work for your company. Coincidentally, this same company acts as my girlfriend’s agent in Tokyo; icing on the coffin was the desperate phone call from one of their consultants last week after she had turned down a job offer, begging her to lie and claim it was due to an elderly family member becoming sick, rather than lose said consultant their referral bonus…