I spent the morning with people I like but didn’t really want to see.

I did this because the company I work for has one simple goal: keep my butt trapped in my house from 9:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m every day during the summer because, well, because they said so. However, every now and then they let me out of the house and tell me to come down to Tokyo for a meeting.

Frankly, I’d rather stay home and “work”.

The meetings involve all the private school teachers assembling at the Tokyo office for a three hour meeting. The meeting today started with our actual decision making boss giving us a short pep-talk about how wonderful we are and how the fact we are private school teacher shows we are like the best teachers in Japan.

The whole time, though, I couldn’t help but bite my pen to keep myself from speaking and or grunting (not a joke) and to think “Put up or the shut the fuck up” because the undertone of his speech was “You are wonderful and special and we will not give you a raise and you have to keep the busy work “work” days but at least I’m saying nice things for the 22.5 seconds I’m going to bother speaking to you before I go back to real work. Yay, you.” (Something like that.)

We then shared ideas and discussed our jobs as if we haven’t done that before at every meeting and wouldn’t rather be doing it over beer. Since there was no beer present, we wondered why we couldn’t have shared ideas via email.

The meeting seems to be less work, but with the travel, I actually end up working exactly the same amount of time and can’t just pretend I’m working, er, I mean working efficiently and effectively. The company is adamant enough about the time table that they remind us not to submit work too early lest it look as if we’re not working. (Note: that’s not a joke; we were told that, in so many words today. Apparently working efficiently and effectively is not allowed.)

The day wasn’t a total annoying loss. After the meeting I had lunch at an Italian restaurant that served the best grilled pork and grilled vegetables I’ve had in Japan (all for only 900 yen or $7.30) and I got a chance to go to a foreign food and beverage store and stock up on a few essentials: pasta, beer, and bourbon.

Tomorrow, I’m stuck in the house again. I will, of course, officially, of course, be working most of the day. I totally won’t be playing a game. (I also now have lots of beer and bourbon.)