WORK

Let’s see… There was a lot of drama surrounding my job at the pool in the last 2 months. I say ‘was’ because my last day will be August 22nd. Long story short, many of the lifeguards who worked at the pool have left because of college or upgrading to a better job and because of that I’ve been stuck working Sundays for most of the summer. I finally decided that the importance of finding and regularly attending a church was more important than working at the pool. Because I am leaving the pool, there will be no swimming lessons for September. Since there are not enough guards to supervise swimming lessons, there will be no pool parties either. The pool will also be cutting the hours it is open. It seems the pool manager is hoping these necessary actions will upset the community enough to get more funding to the pool so she can train and keep good lifeguards. There will only be Japanese lifeguards working for the next several months because their pay is incentive to stay. Drama drama drama.

On the bright side, because I’m no longer committed to a job there’s a good chance I’ll be able to come home this fall for my cousin’s wedding! I’m so excited to get back and see everyone. And once I get back to Japan, I’ll have enough time to be more active with the Youth Group, and play with the women’s group praise band, and teach English on the side! I should look into going back to school to get my Bachelors degree. Right now I have an Associates degree and although it was good enough to land me a job with Principal Financial Group, it’s not enough to land a job on a military base. =)

Mike’s work is not his favorite. I think it bothers him to be stuck in an office at a computer instead of out doing tangible things. I admit it is a HUGE plus to be able to see the fruits of your labor at the end of the day – i.e. installing cable in 12 houses, watering and feeding hundreds of mink, building 3 set pieces for the play, taking care of mentally and physically handicapped people for X hours. Because he’s not able to dig in and learn his job by himself, he gets frustrated when he’s given simple tasks like resetting passwords instead of the more advanced tasks his peers haven’t been able to teach him yet. Needless to say, he doesn’t love his job. And several people in his office don’t either – in fact they’ve tried to re-train to a different job and have been shot down time after time because the field that they are in is “critical to the mission.” If you could, pray that the situation would improve – either that Mike would learn to enjoy his job or a way out would become known.