Work Environment

Most of the day, I'm expected to stay in the "office", a double wide iso-container building. It's snug, and air conditioned, but poorly insulated. The whole place whistles when the wind picks up. My new desk is pretty sweet though. It is situated right in front of a big window, and has a lovely view, including such sights as:

• Industrial lawn, with standard grass, clover, dandilions, and ad-hoc dirt pathways
• The KHI marine loading dock, where airplane sections are wheeled onto barges for transport to the USA
• A "soil reclamation plant" which kind of looks like a cement factory.
• The longest roller-coaster in the world, along with a huge Ferris wheel, and other large attractions at Nagashima Spa Land.
• The entire Suzuka Mountain Range (on clear days only).

So far work here in Japan has gone about how I expected. Our primary duty is to wait for something to go horribly wrong, so we can spring into action by asking permission to see if we can find out what the problem is. It's what I signed up for, but I'm still rather surprised that we're not expected to do much else. I've already written a python script to generate tasks so that I stay productive, but I expect this first month will be mostly spent wandering around looking at stuff, and being politely told to leave poorly marked restricted areas.

So far, so good!