In which Benjamin gets yelled at by a taxi driver and becomes a robot salesman

Today I became a robot salesman. The future is now.

I really didn't plan on taking this job when I went for the first interview. It became more interesting when they explained the nature of the work: I would get to learn how to program industrial robots! It became even more interesting when the software company whose offer I wanted to accept caught up on its back issues of The Economist. They called my boss back to Japan, cancelled their plans to expand into Germany, and sent me the corporate equivalent of a Dear John e-mail. Thank you for a really wonderful time together, it wasn't you it was us, we just aren't ready for the kind of committment that you need... I get to send them a bill for my time, though, an innovation in being dumped that I wish I had thought of in highschool.

Thank heavens I didn't trust them to actually give me the full-time contract they spent the last two months promising me. I wrote an e-mail to these robot people accepting their offer, and today I went down to iron out the last details of my contract. A logistical problem forced me to travel the last two miles or so by taxi from the airport - the train stop at the airport just happens to be the closest to the office - and so I hopped into a taxi and asked the driver if he knew the name of the bus stop I needed to get to.

He glared at me. Without a word, he pulled out. Five silent minutes later, I pointed out that he had missed the intersection with the road my destination was on. Instead of turning around, he stopped the taxi and began yelling at me. I (referred to in this rant as "you stupid young man") had no idea what I was talking about, he (referred to in this blog post as "the provider of marginally the worst customer service I have ever encountered in Germany") had been driving a taxi for 27 years, there was no bus stop with the name I said, and he was taking me to the road with that bus stop's name by the fastest route. I apologized calmly but insisted that the bus stop did exist, that I had in fact taken a bus to it just a week previous, but indicated that if he was en route to the street after which the bus stop was named, then I knew for a fact that he was taking me to the right place. He began driving again, growlingn at me that no such bus stop existed. I asked, again calmly and politely, whether he might have a map of the city with which I could show him where I would like to go. He began yelling at me again, alarmingly this time without stopping the car, asking me somewhat confusingly whether I wanted to know his name, have his business card, or get his license number - I think he was confused by the word Karte, which can mean "card" or "map." My clarification of my question did little to quell the abuse, which by now had escalated so far beyond the pale that I could not really be angry about it, and was in fact beginning to find the whole episode rather amusing.

This very pleasant ride ended when he pulled over at what he insisted was the only bus stop on this particular road, pointing out proudly and loudly that it was not named as I had indicated. I knew that the stop I needed was the next on the bus route, so I told him that I would just walk. I also told him that I understood how frustrating it must be to wait in the taxi line at the airport and then get a low-paying customer, and that I had intended to give him an extra €10 to make it up to him, but that he was lucky to get paid at all considering his unique approach to customer service. Then I got out of the taxi and hurried the two hundred meters down this one-bus-stop road to the next stop, which happened to bear precisely the name I had indicated. And who should be stopped in traffic beside me as I walked by but my friend the cheerful taxi driver. I waved to him, smiled, and pointed helpfully at the bus stop as I crossed the street in front of him. Aaaah, catharsis.

The interview was significantly less interesting than the ride to it. I had spent the morning preparing the speech that I would use to defend my request (communicated earlier by e-mail) for a somewhat more reasonable salary and overtime pay (their first offer had been to pay me more in exchange for not paying me any overtime, their clever way of saying "we'll pay you the same but call it something else.") Then my future boss sat down across the table from me, smiled cheerfully, and, before I could draw breath to begin pleading my case, said he thought I was right. I found this a somewhat unbalancing negotiation tactic, but it didn't leave us with a lot to argue over, so I signed the contract, got introduced to the robots I'll be working with starting next week, and headed out.

On my way home I opted to take the bus.

In which I quote myself

I'm putting the last touches on my thesis before turning it in tomorrow, and I wanted to share one of my favorite insights. Quoted from my introduction:

This text argues from the perspective that all races are ultimately social constructs, but the divisions between races, arbitrary though they may be, are usually associated with observable differences – not only in the physical attributes that are the most common basis of racial distinctions, but behaviorally as well. Minority ethnicities often speak a different language or dialect than the majority in which they are embedded, and they often have a distinct culture or sub-culture. These very real differences can somewhat complicate the study of racism, because racism specifically describes behavior rooted in the stereotyping of human beings based on their attributed race, not on their culture. An example of how the intertwining of these two facets can lead to analytical complications is the fact that the African American community has never fully assimilated into mainstream American culture, and it seems fair to argue that this is to some extent due to racist exclusion and to some extent due to the existence of a distinct African American culture. Because there is unquestionably such a distinct culture, the perception that there exists a difference between African Americans and the white American majority can not be based entirely on the perception of a racial difference, and some proportion of the problem of interracial relations must in fact be a problem of intercultural relations.

Overselling my product

I'm continuing to work hourly for my software-publishing employer until at least the end of the month, and this morning I discovered an amusing translation I had written last week. I was supposed to translate the following into German: "XXX is a huge success on the Japanese market - for two years no other software has sold more." Instead, I wrote "XXX is a huge success on the Japanese market - for two years, no more of any other software has been sold."

By shifting a single adverb, mehr, ever so slightly in position, I had given my employer a 100% market share. Not that that wouldn't be awesome, but I'm thinking the people we're trying to convince to help us sell our wares in Germany won't believe the claim.

In which Benjamin will be an uncle

I have just learned that there is a baby inside my sister in law. I'm going to be an uncle!

Flickr update

Several sets of new pictures are up at Flickr. Click here.

I recommend you click the sets along the right hand side of the screen rather than just look through my photo stream - that way they are in chronological order and arranged by category. Also, I haven't put captions on more than a few pictures yet, so if you want to know what they are all of, take another look in a few days and I'll have updated them all.

In which Benjamin makes a mess

Thursday night after dinner I opened the dishwasher to empty it out, and discovered that the dishes were all covered in gunk - instead of cleaning them, it appeared that the dishwasher had implemented a kind of communist redistribution of filth. When I looked into the base of the machine, I discovered that it still had two inches of water standing in the bottom.

Now, what had actually happened was not at all a big deal; either Rose or I had bumped against the power button while we were making dinner and stopped the dishwasher mid-cycle. Looking at the mess in there, though, and remembering that we'd had a few loads of dishes come out still dirty, I came to the conclusion that the dishwasher's drain had become plugged. When pulling out the filter didn't help, I did the obvious thing and poured in several cups of Draino.

Several hours later, the water still had not drained from the dishwasher. Standing in front of it and dreading the expense of bringing a plumber up to fix it, I noticed that the power button was poking out in its "off" position. When I depressed it, the dishwasher hummed into life.

"Yay!" I exclaimed. My troubles were over!

Only as it turns out, Draino makes bubbles just like dish soap. I know not to put dish soap into a dishwasher, because I did it once as a child when I wanted to help my mom by doing the dishes for her and flooded the kitchen with suds. Fortunately, the image of my mother on her hands and knees in an ocean of soap bubbles has stuck with me through the years, and the possibility that Draino might have high surface-tension occurred to me, so I only let the machine fill up about half way with bubbles before I opened it to check. WOOSH!

Rose had already gone to bed at this point, having asked me to wait until the dishwasher had run through to make sure nothing went wrong. I was up until two in the morning getting that damnable thing fixed. Turn it on for two minutes, open it up, pour in water so that the pump had something to pump other than suds, let the bubbles settle down, turn the machine back on for two minutes... Finally the machine cycled to drain and emptied itself out. I ran it one more time empty to clean out the last residue and went to bed.

Rose woke up Friday morning and went into the kitchen. "Hey!" she called back to me, cheerfully clawing me from my sleep, "I was really concerned about letting the dishwasher run with Draino in it, but it's fine! All that worry for nothing."

I just groaned my assent and went back to sleep.

Music to make the happy

Listen to the above. Even if you don't understand German, I imagine it is a lovely song - I used to be able to turn off German in my brain and just hear the sounds, but I've evidently lost that ability. And marvel, for it is really, really good Christian rap.

As my life has gradually unfolded and new, unexpected experiences overtaken me, I've found myself to be mutable in ways that a younger Benjamin would never have suspected.

My relationship with my wife has been the source of a very large number of these changes, because she brings a quite different perspective into my world. The joy and challenge of that is, of course, a large part of why I married her. Without a doubt, the change in myself that has surprised me the most has been the softening of my heart when it comes to the subject of religion. I'm not sure that faith in any supernatural entity has a place to play in my own world view, but where I was once made very uncomfortable by anything related to God, I now very much enjoy activities like discussing theology with Rose and others who are deeply versed in Christian tradition, attending church services, and singing religious music in the choir.

Another realm in which I have done a... well, not a 180, but maybe a 140 or so, is hiphop. Growing up in Pasco, the only rap I ever heard was of the gangsta variety, in which angry young men with bulging biceps spend entire CD's exhausting the rhyming possibilities of the words "bling", "ho", and "mutherfucker" (my suggestion: "picker-upper"). The last two years or so, though, I've discovered that there's actually an entire world of hiphop that doesn't suck. And tonight, with the song embedded above, I have finally found a hiphop track that even Rose likes.

I just had to post this clip, because nine years ago, when I was all of seventeen years of age and fully convinced that I was a Grown Up Man, I would have scoffed at the very idea of ever liking Christian rap. And that silly, foolish little Grown Up Man that I was would have missed out on a song that brought tears to the eyes of the slightly Growner Upper Benjamin the first time he heard it.

Where I am and how I got here

Nearly a month has gone by during which I've wanted to write here about the results of my job hunt. My life seems to have up and gone completely crazy in that time, leaving me, as so often, with lots to talk about and no time to say it.

Waaaay back in February, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I had not yet joined Facebook - amazing technology that allows me to give my friends virtual cake so they know I like them - I had a remarkable interview with the director of overseas business for a Japanese software company. It was remarkable in that I went to meet with a recruiter, but ended up actually getting a job offer before I went home. I talked to the recruiter for an hour, she called the director, and he then came over and interviewed me and offered me the job more or less on the spot. I can tell you, I was strutting big time on my way home.

The problem, of course, is that this company doesn't exist in Germany yet. Their presence here, to date, is literally me and my boss. And actually he's back in Japan this weekend, so this blog post is being written by my employer's entire German presence. This creates two problems: First, there is no German corporation to hire me. Second, there is a rule at this company that all hires have to be interviewed by two managers, and of course there's only the one here. Personally, I think he should promote me into management and then let me approve myself, but that possibility evidently hasn't occurred to him.

To get around this problem, I've been using a combination of technicalities that allow me to contract myself out as a small business, but at midnight on the 31st, those technicalities lose their mojo and I turn back into an unemployed pumpkin. By then, I'm supposed to have a full-time contract, but one meeting that was supposed to take care of the problem has already been cancelled, so I'm a bit nervous about my prospects - I think the only way to solve the problem at this point might be for me to fly out to Japan and meet with a manager there.

To keep all of my options open, I've been continuing to search for other employment possibilities, which led to an interview this morning with a Japanese company that does sales representation for robotics firms. I was actually not very interested in the job from the description I got, especially because the pay was quite low, but during the interview it became clear that the job would actually pay rather more than I had understood (though still less than my first offer), and the work would be much more interesting than I had imagined. And at the end of this interview, as with the previous one, I was pretty much offered the job on the spot - the difference being that this offer came with an actual contract written on paper with numbers and dates and a line upon which I might affix my signature.

In this economy, I'm incredibly lucky to have two jobs to pick between, but it's a very stressful position to be in. One job pays more and seems more interesting, but still hasn't actually given me a contract and thus I don't know what benefits I would receive. The other pays less, but has very good benefits and has given me an actual contract.

Hopefully, this should all be resolved by the end of the month. I will graduate on the 31st, and both of the full-time jobs I've been offered are supposed to start on the 1st. The ideal case would be that the job I'm doing now offers me a contract so that I have something to compare. Otherwise, I'm not sure what I'm going to do.

One more day

Today was our last full day in Rome. Tomorrow evening will find us back on a plane, winging our way back to Düsseldorf.

Every day but one on this trip we have visited Della Palma, which I can only describe as an ice-cream temple. They have a nine-meter long bay filled three-deep with every ice-cream flavor you could possibly imagine. Each time we visit we get two flavors, served not by the scoop but by the blob, dolloped onto a cone from a long spatula. Except for tonight I've had chocolate every time, and I still haven't even made it through all of the offerings available in that genre. Tonight, though, I went for vanilla and pistachio, both of which were wonderful.

In fact, dinner tonight was the perfect Italian trifecta. Pizza, then espresso from Rome's best cafe (Sant Eustachio, where espresso costs €1, thirty cents more than everywhere else), followed by home-made ice cream. Now I shall retire to the kitchen with Rose and Claudia and sip Lemoncello until the time has come for sleep.

I'm going to miss this place.

When in Rome...

The experience of exploring Rome just gets better with each passing day. I've gotten to know the city well enough now that I generally know where landmarks like the Vatican, the Pantheon, and the Colosseum are relative to us at any given time.

Walking around knowing you're half an hour's walk away from the Roman Colosseum is a badass feeling. I've walked by it three or four times now, and I'm blown away by actually seeing it in persion every time. Tomorrow we're actually going to go inside.

Today we spent the morning visiting the Holy See, home of the Pontifex Maximus. From Rose's theologian friend Claudia I learned that Pontifex actually means "bridge builder," so the Pope, in addition to owning the world's awesomest hat, also bears the title of "greatest builder of bridges." I assume this is a reference to the fact that the Pope's job is to bridge the space between man and God, but it could be that there's some engineering training involved in the poping process.

There are some places in the world that you absolutely have to go but are too overwhelming to actually absorb. The Louvre was one, and St. Peter's Cathedral is another. It's the largest cathedral in the world, and ever nook holds a Bernini or a Michelangelo or a Raphael with a story that books could be written about. According to Rose's travel book the church has 45 altars. So by the time you've properly absorbed half a percent of what there is to see, your brain is full and it's time to move on. Fortunately, where you move on to is the roof of the cathedral, which offers a magnificent view of the city and a remarkably affordable cup of coffee (70 cents a cup for good espresso!)

After this trip to the Vatican (our second, which I have taken to calling Vatican II), we walked to the St. Angelus Castle (sorry if I'm mangling the English of some of these places; my travel guides are all in German). The castle itself wasn't particularly exciting, but I was very amused by the centuries old pathway running along the top of a brick wall that directly connects the fortress to the Vatican - in ancient times the Pope could use this path to escape were the Holy See to come under attack.

The castle was followed by a leisurly walk across the city and a second visit to the restaurant we visited Thursday, where the pizzas are wonderful and cost only €4 apiece.

On our way home, we bought alcohol. Not wine, whiskey, or vodka - 95% pure ethanol. In Germany, you can only get this stuff at a drug store, and at great price. Here it's available in the supermarket. It doesn't even have a warning label, though I think you'd actually have a pretty hard time killing yourself by drinking pure ethanol. I tried half a shot of 140 proof vodka on a lark once in Japan that was so painful to swallow that I can't imagine anyone downing something stronger. The purpose of buying this stuff, in any case, is not to drink as it is, but to use in creating liqueur. The night after we got here, Claudia mixed up a batch of home-made lemon liqueur, which consists of half pure alcohol in which lemon peels have sat overnight and half water saturated with sugar, and it tastes fantastic. I've decided to get a bottle of ethanol for myself and try to make mandarine, lemon-lime, and peppermint liqueurs when I get home.

Sorry for the picture-less posts - I will post my photos to Flickr when I get back to Düsseldorf!

Bella Italia

The proportion of time one has to blog and interesting experiences one has to blog about is inversely proportional. In the last two weeks, during which I have rarely been able to find time to update here, I've been hired by Japan's biggest software publisher, spent a week translating brochures twelve hours a day, and gone to Hannover for three days to interpret for my new boss at the CeBIT tech conference. Finally, I left CeBIT, packed, slept five hours, and got on a plane to Rome.

Fortunately, my trip here was not motivated by business. Rose and I have talked about coming here together one day since shortly after we met in Kyoto more than five years ago, and at some point last year, she just decided it was time to go.

My first impressions of Rome have been of age, and of chaos, and of wonderful food. Turning a corner to suddenly be confronted by The Colosseum is a truly awe-inspiring experience, and one that makes you aware of the inevitable mortality of all things. Crossing a Roman street similarly fills one with deep emotion - in this case fear - and makes one aware of one's suddenly imminent-seeming mortality. The correct way to cross a street in Rome, it has been explained to me, is simply to step into traffic. Mostly the cars stop. And we see ambulances every few minutes as we walk through the city, so when the cars don't stop the Romans will get you to a hospital right quick.

The food is my favorite part. As I have been told a million times, the pizza here is like nothing you can get anywhere else in the world. The crust is even thinner and crisper than anything I've found at even authentic Italian places in Germany. There is much less cheese on most pizza, and on some there is no cheese at all. Today I had pizza marinara for lunch, and it was a very thin layer of very spicy marinara sauce spread over a paper-thin crust, baked until the edges had begun to blacken and drizzled with olive oil. I'm already excited about lunch tomorrow.