October 30th 2012 - Day 54

Well, bottom line is that today was an improvement of sorts. I can't say as yet that it was a huge improvement, but easier to deal with. This morning I had literally no work to do - after arriving earlier than the sempai and struggling to understand what was wrong with what I had done yesterday, he arrived and promptly took me outside for a smoke (which would have been nice if I didn't have to spend the whole time standing up wind of him and breathing shallowly) and he explained that the main thing the company wants from me right now is to get better at Japanese. I think he was trying to tell me I was doing fine and not to worry about yesterday, maybe he noticed I wasn't having a great time of it. What he said didn't exactly warm my heart but I appreciated the sentiment all the same. We then spent the rest of the morning looking up Japanese tutors in my area, of which it seems there are none. And since my weekends are my time and I want to find more interesting ways of learning than paying somebody to talk at me as though I'm back at secondary school, I'm not going to loose much sleep over the problem.

Before lunch though they gave me one bit of illustrator work, which I basically half did then struggled to understand what the hell they wanted - not because it was in Japanese, but because the sempai were talking to each other over my shoulders and probably expecting me to keep up. 

Lunch was certainly different - for once I took the people to the restaurant from yesterday (i think by mistake). The really odd thing though was that it was much quieter. I think they had to get back to the office quickly but they didn't really talk all that much.

And in the afternoon, the sempai had found a bunch of online text book questions and that sort of thing and these were actually much more helpful (when he explained them properly). It certainly helped get my confidence back and it was much more enjoyable than trying to read my text book for the whole afternoon.
But ending the day on a really positive note, I found the suit I'd taken to the cleaners waiting for me when I got back. It was cheap and turned around with 4 days, now thats service.