Efficiency??

After a painfully long boring day sitting at my desk at school, I came home to surf the internet and found this (somewhat dated) article about Japanese efficiency. It's hard to believe, but the Japanese workplace is not an efficient place!! People put in long hours, but a lot of it is just face time - letting the boss know you're there.

Anyway, the link to the article is here.
For those of you who are too busy (and efficient) to read the whole article, I've cut and paste the most interesting paragraphs:

If you want a look at what's really ailing the Japanese economy, just drive
over on any given weekend to the Ito-Yokado shopping center parking lot in
Shinyurigaoka, a large suburb half an hour west of Tokyo. Actually, it doesn't
matter where you go, since the same scene is played out at parking garages,
train stations and construction sites all over the country. But on a typical
weekend here in Shinyurigaoka, there are four guards at the intersection
directing traffic. Another man is on hand to make sure you don't miss the turn
that leads to the garage. Five meters down the path, an attendant removes the
ticket that the machine just generated and hands it to you. Head up the slope to
the first floor and a woman will wave you on, just in case you missed the
brightly lit No Vacancy sign over her head. (Every floor, whether full or not,
gets its own guard.) When you exit, you get the same treatment in reverse: more
floor guards waving you through, a white-gloved attendant to feed the ticket
back into the machine, and a new crew of traffic smoothers to make sure you are
safely on your way. By the end of your visit, at least 20 employees have
provided you with a service of nearly zero value that could easily have been and
was clearly designed to be completely automated.
According to the Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development,
a government-affiliated research center, Japanese laborers are 40% less
efficient than Americans, 20% less efficient than the French and 11% less
efficient than the Germans. The Japanese lag behind not just Britons and Swedes
as well but where will the humiliations end? the Italians and Spanish,
too.

On a related topic, I have seen teachers do the following in the staff room: shave! clean their ears! cut their toenails!! Seriously, just take 5 more minutes in the bathroom at home, please!!

(For those of you wondering just how efficient I was today: I wrote a bunch of emails, planned some vacations for my remaining time, wrote out postcards, read about 100 pages of a novel, organized some photos on my laptop, and counted the days remaining of the school term that started yesterday. All that and I still had plenty of time to stare into space.)