Several years ago I made the mistake of filling out my OCR forms by using the spreadsheet provided by the school where I work. This was not something I usually did and, after what happened, I never did it again.

For various complicated reasons we have to turn in marks before we turn in marks. This allows the homeroom teachers to counsel students and parents and, in some cases, lobby us to “enhance” the marks (more on that in another post). To turn in the marks before the marks we have to enter the marks into a spreadsheet. I’ve always found the spread sheet kind of clunky and prefer to use my own spreadsheet.

In the year in question, out of haste, I used the school’s spreadsheet and, because of haste, I read the wrong row for several of the student’s marks giving them their “end of year mark” long before the end of the year.

This led to a badly timed “meeting”–note: the Japanese have a tendency to want to have meetings “right now” even if “right now” is not a good time for you and you don’t have all the facts you need to provide the information they want–where the then department head asked me about the scores and I, who’d been worried I’d messed up all the marks, was pleased to discover I’d only messed up five or six.

Because I was relieved, the then department head determined that my level of humility and self-torture was not appropriate and he called my company to complain.

My company then called me and meetings in Tokyo and apology letters ensued. I also agreed to meet the then department head in the presence of representatives from my company to do a formal bow and apology. Keep in mind, at no point did I feel any of this was necessary because I felt I’d already apologized and part of me hoped the then department head would die in a fire (figuratively, of course) for running to my company, but I put on a suit and went to work to apologize.

A couple things happened. First, I ended up not having to apologize. I still don’t know why except that my explanation put the blame on their spread sheet as well as my inattention. Second, everyone saw the suit and wondered if I was heading to a job interview. I said that I hadn’t planned on doing so but event might have just made it necessary. Third, most of the women at the school seemed to like how I looked in a suit and encouraged me to wear them more often. (Note: Technically I think they liked the suit; not me in a suit.)

It all worked out in the end and for a while the running joke when someone thought they were in trouble was “Well, I guess I’d better get my suit ready”.

Luckily, I haven’t had a reason to wear one since then.