精華旅行社有限公司

Same as above

5. This is what I found most unbearable. The vice president traveled abroad for a period of time. During that time, I received a call from a hotel asking about the dinner arrangements. Since he was responsible for communicating with the hotel, I was not familiar with the details either. Because I did not have the vice president’s LINE contact, I asked him about it in the company group chat, but he read the message without replying, so the matter was temporarily left unresolved. Later, the owner’s wife discovered that it seemed the rooms for the tour leader and driver had not been booked for one of the days of a certain group’s trip, so she wanted me to ask the vice president about it (at the time, I thought this was extremely strange. Isn’t he your son? Why didn’t you ask him yourself?). I asked him in the group chat again. I tagged him and wrote: “@OOO, for the group departing on X/X, were rooms for the tour leader and driver not booked for X/X?” Again, he read it without replying. About a week later, after returning to the office from abroad, he said to me, “Let me ask you something. Don’t look at the itinerary right now. Do you know which days lunch has been reserved for OOO’s group?” I said I didn’t know, and he immediately replied, “Exactly. You don’t even know yourself, so how would I know which group and which hotel you’re talking about while I’m overseas? You need to speak more clearly instead of leaving out half the information.” I admit that I should have included the group name and hotel name, and that I was not clear enough. But couldn’t he have asked? He and his mother initially told me to ask whenever there was a problem, yet now, when he had a problem himself, he did not ask and instead waited until he returned to complain. Even if he could not deal with it while traveling, if he could read the message, he could have replied. What’s more, if you are going abroad for more than two weeks, you should know that there will be a lot of work to handle, so it is only natural to finish your own work in advance, isn’t it? When there is a problem with your own responsibilities, you go abroad to have fun, make someone else clean up after you, and then complain that they did not do it well enough. If someone insists that, because he is a supervisor, it is only right for me to do his work for him, then I can accept that. But when someone helps you with your work and encounters a problem, you read the message without replying or asking about it, then complain afterward, and on top of that have such a terrible attitude that the whole thing is made to seem like my fault. Later, the sarcastic remarks over similar incidents in the past, combined with this incident, became too much for me, so I called the owner’s wife directly that same day. Although they are family, she is still my employer, so I thought she could at least mediate. However, the owner’s wife seemed to be deflecting the issue, saying things like, “This is a communication problem, so what you need to do now is observe more and learn more.” She then brought up how the previous employee had worked there for two years and still could not find restaurants on her own, saying that if she had wanted to quit, she would not have tried to keep her. This really was a communication problem, but how can you communicate when your son does not reply at all? At the time, I tried to steer the conversation back to the main point: “Of course I can learn, but what I am dissatisfied with is his attitude. He had a problem at the time but did not ask about it, and then complained afterward.” Only then did the owner’s wife tell me, “Since we cannot change his personality, we have to learn to adapt to it. We are only a small company. If you go to a large company, many people form cliques, and there are even more difficult people to deal with. All the group-tour customers I host now act as if they are lords and ladies. I still have to put up with it.” I thought that since she was saying this, it meant there was nothing she could do. What ultimately made me leave was what happened after I spoke with the owner’s wife. I do not know whether it was because I had complained about her son, but she seemed to have the same tendencies as he did. I had only been working there for a short time, and she had told me at the beginning that no one could learn everything after hearing it just once, so we had to learn and practice more. I was only trying to make sure I understood things clearly, but she would use wording that felt rather impolite, such as, “I wrote it down,” or “I already told you that from the beginning…” Of course, this may simply be a matter of personal perception, but since I felt that the owner’s wife was showing some early signs of the same problem, and I was already unhappy with her son, I resigned after receiving my salary.

When I first arrived, the owner’s wife told me that she preferred hiring recent graduates and hoped we could learn the proper practices of Japanese companies. However, the mother and son had different ways of doing things. Although the son had studied in Japan, he was not particularly impressive; when problems arose, he blamed employees instead of trying to understand the situation first. I could not sense anything here that resembled the practices of a proper Japanese company.

Previously, the vice president told me that three new employees had once worked for only one day and then quit. I asked him why, and he told me, “I don’t know. If they don’t tell us why, how would we know what the problem was?” I could see what the problem was on my very first day. He never considered that he himself might be the problem, so of course he could not find it. The other employees all know what his personality is like. He will never change anyway, and it is probably best that he never realizes it. Although the incidents described above were not recorded (it would have been impossible at the time to take out my phone and say, ‘Sorry, could you say that again?’), they took place in the office, so other employees can corroborate some of them, and everything stated is factual. At most, the dialogue may not match word for word, but the meaning has not been altered.