Day 5 - Global Services Presentations today

Day 5 - Started with me waking up after 4 hours of sleep at 4am... way overtired, I uploaded pics and did some work. About an hour before we were all leaving for our our new work destination, I walked around the neighborhood looking for a dry cleaner/launderer... No luck, must be a service. I found a grocery store, not that I will do much cooking. But it's always fun to shop at a foreign grocery store so I walked around and took pics until the butcher ran out and asked me to stop. Competitive price issues probably... I tried to calm his objections by explaining I had never been to a Japanese grocery store and my friends around the world would be interested in seeing his shop. That did not assuage his temper, so I slinked out of the store. I won't buy tuna from him today, that will show him.

We have a great commute, world class. 5 min walk to a train station originally established in 1918. Take a world class, ultra clean train with thousands of polite citizens 10 min down the road to an ultra modern train station and then another 5 min walk to one of the nicest modern office buildings I've ever been in.

Day 5 was sitting through mega group powerpoint presentations concerning the groups we'll work in, support and / or interact with on a daily basis. Then in traditional Japanese business style, we walked around to each pod of 50-100 employees and introduced ourselves, where we are from and where we are assigned to, by microphone and PA system. I mean literally one minute everyone is working and I'm thinking, I'm really going to have to use my outside voice to get my introduction across. We walk up to the department a microphone appears, the manager pulls a wireless karaoke looking speaker out from the table and we are live. "Hello my name is John Nassar, from NTT America, Denver Colorado and I'm going to be working in Service development under Matsuura san and I'm going to be singing Barry Manilow's Mandy, can some one get me a big beer?" We did that about 10 times... sans the singing of course... everyone claps and then gets back to work... and everytime we find a new group to introduce ourselves to, the head HR lady is saying, "I'd be so nervous, you guys are great, I can't believe we make you do this... " And at first I agreed, but you know what, now these people know who we are and aren't on edge with all of us just showing up and working in their space. We should adopt this idea in America, sure its seems uncomfortable, but tough noogie, we should do it.

I have a world class view from the windows that border our tables we sit at... this is a very public nation and private space is only afforded to the group president, a nice spacious office with glass walls... even he doesn't get the privacy afforded a middle level manager in America. Should be interesting to see how this affects the psyche. I won't ever take for granted a cube or small office again! I promise!

The vending/water cooler machine in the breakroom is jawdropping gorgeous and impressive. The bathrooms are ONLY topped by the Germany bathrooms at BMW and Mercedes Benz world headquarters. I've been to many a bathroom in my time and Granpark Tamachi building is world class... I'll have to take pictures...

It's customary to share gifts with your coworkers when you arrive. I brought a slew of Colorado made items... Rocky Mountain Chocolates, and Celestial Seasonings Organic Green and White teas... Jennifer wrapped all of this in brown paper with red ribbons and labels made to look like the state of Colorado. It went over well. I have the best wife. :)

I was issued a laptop and a NTT Docomo phone ( our sister division) that serves as my office phone and my Tokyo cellphone, really amazing technology. Of course it was in Japanese and no one could figure out how to put it in English. It took me all of 5 min on the web to find English instructions on how to put the language into English from Japanese. Cool phone though, when inside the building it picks up a signal so my internal extension can be used and is also a 3G GPS Data smartphone... I'll have to take pics... that Tokyo exchange phone number is 080-2008-5647.

It gets dark around 5:30pm. I took a pic of the Tokyo tower outside our window on the 21st floor.