A reluctant job eventually helped me grow

I'm going to tell the story that reluctant jobs could grow you if you do your best, which I have experienced so far.

Last year, I was assigned to one job which I thought is reluctant for me at that time because I thought it just seemed to be hard and not to be what I wanted to do. Another colleague was also asked prior to me, but he denied it, so I was not able to deny it because there is no one but me to be able to that job. This job was technical customer interface to one customer in English. My job was to discuss what the customer wanted, what could be possible and what schedule could be satisfied based on the customer's requirements with the customer by tell conference. First a few months, it was very painful mentally while realizing that what I was doing was very important for our company. However, I did my best to do this in order for both success because my policy is to do any job without cutting corners. Every day, I asked myself if this was what I had to do and struggled to consider what I was going to do. However, as I got better relationship with the customer, I came to feel happy to do this job more that ever, although I still thought what I needed to do was more technical jobs. When our sales manager visited the customer, the customer appreciated my work very much, and the sales person told me so. When I heard of this, I thought what I did paid off finally and felt that any reluctant jobs could be interesting depending on how I work on that. 

Now I acknowledge that this job made me grow more than ever and more than I expected. A lesson which I got is that any jobs could make me grow and whether I can grow or not depends on how I work on that.

I suddenly developed an allergy to shellfish

I might develop and have an allergy to shellfish unfortunately. This reminds me of the moment when I realized that I have developed an allergy to pineapple two years ago. Am I going to develop more ? I don't want to imagine this future, but this makes me afraid of that. I suppose that this is not the case only for me, so I want to share my story of why I came to conclude that I had the allergy to shellfish.

Two weeks ago, I had sushi lunch with my wife's parent on Mother's day in Asakusa. A restaurant at we enjoyed sushi has a long history and is very famous as well as authentic sushi in Asakusa in Tokyo. There are several courses for lunch and we chose $70 course. That's expensive actually, but that was ok because this was kind of once in a year experience. Sushi was so tasty and it is worth the price, and I totally enjoyed sushi. The problem happened about one hour later when I was on a train to Yurakucho to buy seasoners. I suddenly felt throwing up and stomachache lightly. I was lucky because it was almost close to the destination station, and I could get off the train soon when I felt so. At first I thought that it was due to cool temperature in the train because my stomach has intolerance to cool temperature, which sometimes happens to me, and I hoped that it improved soon after getting out of the train. This feeling became stronger even thought I was walking outside in a sunny day. So I realized that something was wrong and unusual, and I tried to find a bench and took a rest. It took around two hours to recover from it completely. I was wondering what was wrong and suspected raw shellfish sushi which I usually don't eat because I just don't like it. I, however, ate it reluctantly because that was a part of the course. I had not been sure about that until yesterday.
Yesterday, I ate vongole bianco for lunch at home, which is basically clam pasta with garlic. I like the pasta and I sometimes enjoy it. Furthermore, I like clam miso soup and clam chowder. So I did not have an allergy to clam. After lunch, I headed for Tokyo to enjoy new beer which became available as of yesterday. When I got on a train, I again felt that something was wrong in my stomach lightly and it became stronger when I got to Tokyo station. It was just one hour later after the lunch. I felt throwing up and suffered from stomachache and diarrhea, which I didn't have any clue for that. I didn't think properly at that time, but my wife pointed out that this must be due to clam because my symptom was similar to that of two weeks ago. It might be true, but I couldn't believe and did not want to admit that because I like to eat clam and have eaten clam a lot so far. I checked if someone have experience like this while sitting on a bench on the station to take a rest, and I found that many people suffer from the similar symptom and figured out that it is not unusual to develop an allergy to shellfish after turning adult. Rather, it is usual to become intolerance to some foods at adult age. I might be able to rule out food poisoning because my wife ate same one.

So .... I don't want to make a conclusion, but I seem to have the allergy to shellfish now even though I did not have it so far. What I want to know is if a matter is an amount or if even small amount matters. Anyway, I should avoid shellfish as much as possible from now unfortunately.

Salary for happiness

How much salary do you think people feel happiness most with ?

It seems to be around $75,000 statistically according to the research which was done in U.S. When I heard of this, I thought that it makes sense to me even in Japan as average value, but it depends on where you live and how old you are when it comes to know detail of breakdown, which was not described there in a reference.

From my viewpoint, $75,000 would not be enough for living around Tokyo if you have a family with children. Especially housing cost is much higher in Tokyo than in other places for sure as it is same with the San Francisco bay area. I would say that $75,000 might be good enough as an average number for a man who is around 35 years old with a wife and two children in other places .

As is always said, there are two aspects which make you feel whether you are living happily or not. Those are definitely personal life and work, but I have to admit that these two things are related and affect each other actually. If you feel stress in an office or if you make mistakes, it definitely affects your personal life. Vice versa, practically. Depending on people who especially think negatively, once something negative happens either personal life or work, negative feedback loop also happens and people feel stuck. 
On the other hand, people who always think positively don't enter the loop. Amazingly such people don't take negative as negative rather positive.

I have watched a documentary video about happiness in Netflix before, although I forget the title name. The documentary focus on what's keys for people who say that they are happy, how happiness affects human life and finally try to understand how people living longer think. The summary of the document which I understood are three points.

• Try to eat healthily
• Try to think happily
• Try to think positively

These look simple and obvious, but it's not easy to make these habits. Making them habits is very important point.

Regarding work, there are different perspectives with which people feel happy, depending on people. If there are 100 people, there might be 100 ways of thinking.  I personally have three things of which I feel happy.

• Autonomy
• Purpose
• Progress

I feel happy when I do work autonomously with having purposes and feel progress as a result.

Psychologically, there are 5 hierarchical of a pyramid to define human need. It says that human satisfaction has 5 levels in our daily life and it gets difficult to satisfy yourself from bottom to top. First level is basically what people need to live at least. Level 2 is also what people need to live normally. Level 3 is relationship satisfaction. Level 4 is esteem like how you are regarded and respected. Level 5 is top one and what successful people need to satisfy themselves. You can associate personal life and work life with those levels.

I would say that I'm in the middle of level 4. From my expectation for myself, I'm not happy about that, but I have to take this positively.


Reference
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2019628,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

She might be suffering from epilepsy

This is a story which I have experienced one month ago in a bus.

It was the early February and was very cold evening around 8pm. I just came back to a station to which I live close, from the dinner with my wife in Roppongi, and we decided t use buy to go home because it was very cold, even though we usually walk for 20min to my apartment as an exercise. When we got on the bus, there were not so many peoples in the bus and the bus closed the door and left the started the bus station. Just after the bus moved, I heard yell from the front place in the bus but did not know who yelled. It was not a word but yell just like animals. Soon after that, I noticed that a girl sitting just behind the driver seat showed something wrong at first and her body was getting cramp from her head to her foot. I immediately felt that I needed to help her and unconsciously came to her and supported her boy and asked the driver to stop the bus immediately and to do emergency call. She actually frothed at the mouth when I saw her face. I'm actually used to emergency situation from many experience, but the driver was a little bit panicked unfortunately, but he managed to be able to call for an ambulance. Fortunatelly, there is a hospital close to the station, so it just took about 10 min to come. While we were waiting the ambulance to come, I thought that we had to contact her family to tell her condition and know what to do just in case that this was chronic situation for her. When I opened her wallet, I soon recognized that this was unfortunately chronic because she had a card which tells an emergency contact phone number of her mother in the case that she has something wrong. In order to contact her mother, I found her cell phone and checked the history, and found her mother number easily because she just called her mother just 30 min before. I was supporting her body,s so I asked my wife to call to her mother. When my wife called, her mother soon answered and told my wife that she has family doctor just exactly at the hospital which is close to the station and her mother would go there soon. When the ambulance arrived, she had already stopped cramp, but she still looked like unconscious but looked fine at the same time. 

At that time, I did not know what she suffered from, but it might be epilepsy by comparing her condition and what I checked in the internet.

What was the saddest thing after that is that her mother tone was as if she was sick of her daughter's condition according to my wife. 
This world is not fair from the time when we are born as it is recognized by many peoples. I was born healthy, but she was born with a health problem. She has to live with it forever. Because of that, her activity would be limited to fear that the cramp happens. I personally admit that our life is determined to some extent by the condition with which we are born. If you are born in poor family, there is a less chance that you would be able to get a good education. 

I'm still wondering who helped her if I had not been there. At least nobody tried to help me support her in the bus.

How unfair this world is.

Business trip to San Diego

I lived in San Jose in California before and I thought that it is great weather there, but it is so as well in San Diego. I had a colleague who used to go to San Diego every weekend and said that San Diego is the best place for living. Now I understand it a little bit.

  
I had been to the San Diego airport, but it was just transit. I went to San Diego finally last month by business trip for two days, but I felt that the weather was great more than I feel usually because I stayed at San Francisco before going to San Diego and it rained and it was cold. This was business trip so I did not have much time to enjoy San Diego, but I had a chance to go out for lunch for almost two hours and enjoyed a good lunch at a restaurant close to a beach. I thought that if I got used to this weather, I would not be able to live in Tokyo in terms of weather. 

However, I saw a dark side a little bit when I came back to a hotel. It was just before the sun set and was not dark yet. When I got out of a rent car and waiting for my colleagues to do something, I felt someones get close to me. A woman and a small child came to me and I soon realized that they were homeless and would ask me money. My thought was true and she said something that she needs money indirectly, but I said that I can not help you and didn't give money. I'm not sure what's right or wrong regarding this, but I'm still wondering if I should have given money to her because she looked so desperate and sad when I said so unlike homeless peoples in San Francisco who are very aggressive to get money. If I came back to the time when I said so, I would call her when she showed her back to me and was about to go somewhere ,and give her some money.

Water hole in dam : Bing screen

Have you ever seen a hole like this before ?
I had never seen this until I saw this on the screen of Bing.

Bing is a search engine of Microsoft (probably), and is naturally the default search engine of the Internet Exploer. I'm using Chrome at home and Firefox at the office, but open IE once a day for work to fill in what time I come to and leave the office every day with an internal web page. This kind of internal pages usually works only with IE. My IE setting is default setting and don't feel like customizing it, so I see the screen of Bing every day when I do daily work for that. I, however, like one feature of Bing more than any other search engine. My favorite feature is that Bing shows us a daily picture with some explanation, and this picture is usually amazing picture which I have never seen until I see it on the screen of Bing. I found the most interesting picture on the daily screen last week, that is the picture shown above. This seems like a hole in dam to adjust the amount of water because water is usually adjusted by opening and closing the gate of dam. I'm not sure why this image intrigues me, but it might be because this look like mysterious hole which never exists naturally and I would never be able to come out once I fall. I found the video of the hole below. It's worth watching how it works.

Did you watch this ? 
It's super scary for me just by imaging falling into this hole ...

Picture link

Cell phone battery consumes faster in a bullet train

My friend told me that he turned off his cell phone purposely because a battery of cell phone consumes faster in Shinkansen.

Japan is the new year holiday season from the end of December to the early January. This is also the time when people come back to their hometown and stay with relatives and friends. One of my friends also came back from a place which is far from Tokyo by using Shinkansen which is very famous bullet train all over the world. I met him at the Tokyo station and talked a lot about what we did in the 2013 at a beer bar. It is always fun to meet people for a long interval. On that day, we were going to meet around 6 pm at the station, and I sent an email to him to make sure of it around noon, but I did not receive the reply even after a few hours. So I was wondering what's going on him and I finally called him even by considering that he might be in the train, but what I heard was a automatic guidance saying that his cell phone was turned off or he was in a place where signal is not available. He responded back my email just one hour before the time. What is interesting to me was that he turned off his cell phone purposely and turned on it again after he got off the train. According to him, cell phone battery consumes much faster than he usually uses it. It is coincident because I have study the modern communication system recently by myself and just understood how moving mobile phones stay connected with base stations and how it works technically.

We basically call to somebody and send date like email through base stations which manage much traffic on behind. Each cell phone has to be connected to base stations anytime in order to work properly and base stations have to know how many users there are, how far they are and much information which is necessary for optimized communication. As the figure above shows, each base station has own cover area, and mobile users in, for instance, area A are supposed to communicate with the base station in area A. In order to stay connected together, mobile phone and base stations send and receive their information even though users don't use cell phones unless cell phones are turned off. If users don't move much, then their communication environment doesn't change much, so cell phones and base stations does not necessarily communication much. However, if the user moves fast, what happens is that users go through ares of base stations much, and cell phones try to connect to a new base station every time when users cross a boarder from one are to adjacent area. Precisely, connecting to the new base station is relatively much burden on mobile phones because it takes much calculation in order to estimation transmit path information together with the new base station. It means much power consumption. So that's why battery consume faster in a bullet train. 

This is my understanding.

The picture is from
http://www.odec.ca/projects/2007/hopp7m2/Cellular_Phones.html