Dan Visits Chicago

My friend Dan was in town today, which was a nice surprise. I got a call from him last night, and we made plans to meet up over lunch downtown.

Dan’s been in Japan (teaching) for the past seven years, and just recently moved back to the States. His wife is going to be heading over in a month or so, and in the meanwhile… he’s looking around for gainful employment in Indianapolis. As part of the process, he needed to get a police report from Japan. Not sure exactly what that is, but I think it’s just some official statement saying that he doesn’t have any outstanding warrants, hasn’t robbed any banks lately, etc.

Funny thing I found out from Dan: he said he has recommendation letters from his previous employers, but no one here in the States understands the significance of that. In Japan, apparently, if you do anything untoward or wrong… your work finds out about it. Literally!

If you, say, get pulled over for drunk driving? One of the first things the authorities do is call your employer. I guess the notion is that, even off the clock, employees are still “representatives” of the places they work.

Dan posed a hypothetical for me: say that you got into a car accident, and it was a really bad one. So bad that someone else ended up dying as a result. Say that you went through a whole formal hearing, and were acquited of any wrongdoing. More likely than not, you’d be fired.

One of the teachers at Dan’s school got into an accident, and broke his arm. At the school, they don’t hire on subs to teach; the other teachers take on the additional courseload, and cover for the absent instructor. When the guy got back, he had to stand in front of all the faculty and apologize for being away, and thank them for covering his classes. Crazy!

We swapped stories mostly, and got caught up on what the both of us have been up to. I think it’s been almost 3 years since I last saw Dan, so being able to chat with him in person again is rather nice.

The two of us talked at length over email and the phone, a month or two back. I should point out that Dan is the author of Astronaut, the song that I ended up visualizing through Flickr.

We talked briefly about how surprised we both were, at the attention we both received. One of Dan’s favorite moments during the apex of the experiment’s popularity was hearing his name spoken by a lovely German woman.

I should also point out that Dan’s supplied a lot of the music for my experiments. In addition to the Astronaut project, a song off his album called “Pain in the Elbow” (played by Scott Fox) is the background/themesong for my 3 Years 3 Minutes project.

It was good to see Dan again, albeit for a brief lunch visit. I can’t wait to hang out at length, and to hear more stories about life in Japan.