Hello friends,
If you have been following my blog I am sorry for the super slow updates. During the past 4 months that I didn't update my blog, I had so many events and changes that would be a very important step in my life. I graduated from my uni that I went to for 4 years at the end of March, and since April 1st I've been working with JR(West Japan Railway company). If you are living in or have traveled in Japan, especially in the west area of the mainland, you probably have used trains or shinkansen(bullet trains) which belong to my company.
The new Kyusyu Shinkansen which connects mainland and the southern island
I'm currently working at Midori- no Madoguchi, the ticket reservation office in the station which is about 40 mins away from home by train. My daily work is mostly selling tickets and making seat reservations for shinkansen(since my station is one of the stations where some shinkansens also stop). Making some documents and posters to display in the concourse is also my work. Sometimes we go on a business trip to the branch office and to the headquarter in Osaka, which is quite fun.
You may think selling tickets is just an easy & simple task (because I had thought so until I started working here), but it's NOT. It's more like a brain work than I expected. Especially when the customer is going to a place which is quite far away or to the places I don't even know whereabouts, I need to be very very careful not to make wrong tickets, referring to the map of all railways in Japan, because those routes and tickets are usually going to be very complicated ones. Also, we have loads of kinds of tickets and I need to know well about each of them. I spend most of the time at the window just sitting in front of the computer, but when I get back home I'm so exhausted I just fall dead into my bed.
Midori - no Madoguchi, the JR ticket office
(This picture is not from my station )
Of course I still sometimes make some mistakes, and there are some customers who love giving complaints to us and claiming unreasonable things, but I'm getting used to handling them (and I'm not a person who gets down by such small things =] ). Except those few customers, I think people in this city are quite nice and I really enjoy meeting lots of people who use our service at the start and the end the day. Though the city is not that big and there's no place for sightseeing, foreigners often come to my window like every day, and I have many chances to speak English.
The remodeled Osaka station, aka Osaka Station City
Seeing people spreading out to everywhere around Japan (or to the world ) from our station every day is what I love the most at work. It makes me want to travel more all over Japan, as well as overseas. I'm planning to make some railway trips with my friends when we get used to work(maybe next month) using the discount, though I'm still just too busy to make it happen at the moment.
I'm still on the way of training, and sometimes I feel it's tough to have many things I need to learn, but I'm proud of my work at the station which supports many people's daily lives.Well, I'll just do my best. Wish me luck! ;-)
