These lingering summer days find me in a listless funk, a consequence of spending every weekday, morning to night, at work. It's been five months since I started here, and the wear is starting to show. In the past when I've come to Fujisawa on business trips, I've worked crazy hours, but that's typically on a focused problem or two, and then I go home after three weeks. Now I can do it all the time, continuously, for the remaining 13 months! Yeah!! Not only that, I have to be my own manager: I'm serving both Mobile and Desktop BUs, and since I got a new manager in the U.S. before I left, I have virtually zero direction in my work. Nobody tells me what my priorities are, nobody really checks up on me, and nobody really gives me feedback so I don't know if I'm doing an amazing job or a piss-poor one. What I wouldn't give for a critical situation: at least then I'd have a clear-cut objective and game parameters. As it stands now, I have to do all that myself. Like I told Mr. Green, "It's the non-emergencies that are killing me."

Previous assignees were given a host country manager, who they basically had to slave for. That would've been preferential to this. Why complain that I don't have someone watching over my shoulder or guiding me? First of all, I have a work ethic. Hitachi GST spent half a million dollars setting up this assignment, so I feel that I have to make it worthwhile. Second, I got a promotion before I came over here. Granted that was more because the HGST IA program sucks compared to IBM's and my 2nd-line needed to make adjustments, but I feel the extra responsibility just the same. The guys on my team back in Rochester at the same band level do some heavy stuff, and if I don't keep up to par, I let myself down and show everyone that the promo was a mistake.

This isn't like Clerks where anyone can walk in and do my job. How many people have degrees in both EE and Japanese, can work with hardware and still have strong software skills, and is willing to do integration work? Let me clue you, not many. Although this position is niche, I've had an impact, bringing the channel area many times my salary in business, and saving the company a similar amount. So can I say with some amount of swagger that the value of my work in the past three years has been over a million dollars. The HDD industry could be called the most difficult technology industry there is, at least with respect to most proliferate devices. (Automobiles are yet more ubiquitous, but aren't nearly as amazing in the physics of scale.) Well, if I'm giving myself an illusion of self-worth it's because this isn't what I do best. Lately I've been thinking, "If this isn't what I do best, hell, maybe I should set this aside and do something truly amazing!"

Is it any wonder that I feel the drain of being a cog in the machine, feeling pressure and yet not being able to fulfill the job to my satisfaction? One reason I liked John Mayer's "No Such Thing", and to a lesser extent "Bigger Than My Body", is that I feel like I'm capable of so much more, and that my talent is burning out the longer I leave it unexercised. Perhaps that's just latent arrogance; perhaps I should just hunker down and acclimate to the life of a salaryman, 9-5 (er, 9-9+?), wife and two kids, and a gold watch when I retire (although it probably will be chrome by the time I'm of retirement age, and who'll be able to retire on these non-existent pension plans?). Perhaps my ideals have been poisoned by the folly of the "American Dream".

The way I see it, in order to make an impression on the world, one has to have the will. The question I pose to myself now is: Do I have the will?