Friday, March 20, 2009

Being unneccesarily guided

Trying to thing of something to blog about, I decided to continue the good ol' whats different about Japan series. Some may say it's too easy, but hey. It's a three day weekend and I'm feeling lazy.

After the vending machines, cuteness, everything being small, and no greenery anywhere except for public parks, another thing that you start to notice after living here are the people whose sole job is to guide you.

I'm not talking about people guiding you through the wilderness, or on a tour of a foreign country or other places where you would actually need a guide. What I am talking about are those unfortunate men and women whose day of drudgery involves guiding you
*up an escalator
*into an elevator
*into a parking garage
* on a clearly marked pedestrian path when there is construction.

Yes, they do exist. On my route to work in the morning, due to the hopeful investors building hotels in case Tokyo wins the bid for 2016 Olympics(the proposed stadium site would be really close to my office), there is a frenzy of construction. Due to some law or another, they have to make a pedestrian route around the construction zone (fine with me), but they also have to dedicate a worker to guide you onto the *clearly marked* path.

Also, for some reason... my station has an over-enthusiastic elderly worker who takes it upon himself to say "ohayou gozaimasu" to every single person, and gesture you onto the escalator. Every time. Just in case you forgot where the escalator was since yesterday.
So between him and the three construction sites on my route, I can't help feeling a little... okay, a lot like a cow, being very politely herded to the office. もおおおお! (this means both "moo" and "jeez, enough already" ;))

1 Comments:

Blogger Weav said...

I observed that too... I'm surprised you don't see more "elevator ops" whose job it is to push the floor buttons on the automatic elevators (not, as in the old days, run the up/down lever).

[Saw those in the state capitol bldg. in Sacramento, though...]

SO is guiding people to the escalator a worse or less-bad job than handing out fans and tissue samples?

8:54 AM  

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