My career has gone mouldy.

It is Saturday and I am a cleaning machine: I was away doing a training course for the week and came back to find I had squatters - tiny mould spores making their home in my sink, bath and toilet bowl. You see, it's rainy season in Japan - a time of hot, humid stickiness, broken by frequent thunderous downpours. All that fetid moisture can turn the unattended apartment into a Petri dish in a matter of days.

I actually have a pretty high tolerance for the mugginess of rainy season and don't hate it as much as many others living here. I mean, I haven't yet used my air-conditioner, even though we're now at the beginning of July. Nonetheless, the rain and endless grey skies tend to get me down. Yesterday was a prime example of why I hate the rain.

So, as I've mentioned before, our plants and research centres are all located in the back arse of nowhere. The place where we were running the course is accessible by a dinky little mountain train. Even in the best of weather, you have to wait over an hour and a half between trains on this godforsaken line. But yesterday we got caught in a torrential downpour that flooded the tracks and left us stuck in a shed (you could not call it a station) for over three hours. We waited and waited and waited, with little else to do but watch the fork lightning and try to get some sleep. In the end, the promised train never even came and we were forced to get a ridiculously expensive taxi to the nearest major town.

In other work news, transfer intrigues continue apace and I still have no idea what's going to happen to me. I get told I'm being moved to a different job practically weekly at this stage, with the yucky international sales division still being the front runner. In the meantime, though, I have finally been getting some interesting work to do again. My colleagues will be recruiting in Ireland this month and I had to help out by translating a Japanese language personality test that we use regularly in domestic recruitment.

For any translation nerds out there, this topic could form the basis of a really interesting research project. I came upon lots of great questions: bearing in mind that a translation usually ends up longer than the original, should you change the format or grouping of the questions or is there a psychological reasoning behind the original layout?; what should you do about questions that make culturally specific references (e.g. asking an Irish person if their image of summer is someone watching fireworks in a yukata certainly won't be worth much)?; and how much can you depend on the results of any character evaluation if you don't have some way of localizing the statistical data on which it bases its evaluations? It really fascinated me and made me pine a bit for a time when I thought I might have a career as an academic.

Another great thing about the translation was that it allowed me to take some passive aggressive digs at my employers. After translating the questionnaire, I did a trial run with myself as the subject. The output was hilarious. The test told me that I was an extremely conscientious, detail-oriented, rule-bound worker, with solitary tendencies and a dislike for social interactions. All sounds about right to me. But get this, they then rank the jobs in the company you would be best suited to and the jobs you should not be placed in. Top of my list were things like quality assurance, legal affairs, management accounting and the like. And then the careers I should avoid??? Sales, sales promotion, marketing and advertising!!!!

But the best part of all was when I showed the results to my boss and I explained what the evaluation said of me. His response? "I think we need to find a new test!" That's right, rather than recognize that moving someone to an area to which they are completely unsuited is a disaster waiting to happen, he would like to find a personality test that validates making a circular peg fit into a square hole. If nothing else, this experience is really giving me lessons in the way large Japanese institutions think.　出るくいは打たれる ( deru kui wa utareru). Literally this cliched proverb means 'the nail that sticks up gets hammered down', but in other words you could say 'Don't make waves!'