***

While most of the people that contact the General Union for advice and help are polite (which, at the very least, is a base requirement of asking for help from someone else), there are some who don’t seem to understand that acting professionally and respecting others on the Internet is one of the best ways to convince people to get the assistance that you want.

Conversely, operating under the mistaken belief that acrimony is more effective at delivering results than civil dialog is not, shall we say, going to compel anyone to rush to your aid.

Guess which of the two kinds of people we’re talking about today.

***

It’s important at this point to state that when you contact the General Union, your privacy is important to us.

In this case, however, the person who wrote the following emails did so from an anonymous burner account that they deleted when they didn’t get their own way.

There, as there is absolutely no chance of this individual being identified by anyone (other than themselves), we thought we’d go ahead and show you some of the nonsense that we have to deal with on occasion.

Nonsense like this:

(Note: we’ve redacted all of the profanity and racial slurs)

 I used to work at that ████ing piece of ███ ████hole that you guys call “Nova”. I so thankfully don’t ████ing work there or at any piece of ███ eikaiwa ███hole anymore, and I’m also not even in Japan anymore. So ████ing thankfully on both of those accounts!

My problem here isn’t those ████ing pieces of ████ at Nova. It’s the job review site “Glassdoor”. As you guys over there at the GU may have noticed, in the last year (starting from February of 2017) one or two Nova managers have been flooding the ████ out of Glassdoor’s Nova review section with false-positive reviews, false-positives for both jobs and interviews. It’s so ████ing insane to see about 30 to 50 of the 80 total job and interview reviews be false-positives! Yet, Nova still has a low 2.6 rating? That shows you how much of a ████hole Nova is, doesn’t it?

Around August of last year, I wrote a big-███ negative Nova review (maybe 10,000 words) that I put up on Glassdoor, but the review got taken down and it is not being allowed to go back up! Not being allowed to go back up for some 7 ████ing months now! Those ███holes at Glassdoor only reply with generically evasive form letters that don’t tell me exactly what the problem with my review is. Yeah ████ing right! There’s no problem to begin with, anyway. That site being a total piece of ████ is what the problem really is.

I spent a ton of time on this review, but it’s doing nothing because ████ing Glassdoor won’t put it up. As I then try to think of a different way to approach all of this, would any of you GU guys be willing to take the review from me and try to post it yourselves? If Glassdoor saw that the review were getting posted under a different account they might be more willing to work with it again. I cussed Glassdoor the ████ out so much that they just won’t have anything to do with me anymore. But they ████ing deserved it! That place, Glasssdoor, has a D- rating with the BBB (Better Business Bureau) of the United States! Glassdoor is another ███hole company, just like ████ing Nova!

So then, are you game? 

As you might imagine, we were not “game”.

Though we had no obligation to do so, and while we don’t understand why anyone would think it’s acceptable to talk to anyone else in that manner, we replied to this individual that while we understood their frustration, posting a negative (profanity laden) review on behalf of someone else (who had previously had it deleted and then got banned – we can’t imagine why) is not something that the General Union could do.

It would be illegal misrepresentation, we said, and – as an organization that calls companies out for breaking the law – it would be hypocritical for us to break the law ourselves.

So, we wished them the best of luck in their future endevours.

They didn’t like that.

 What the ████ are you talking about? You know why these eikaiwas are running all over us over there in Japan? One, it’s because the Japanese law protects pieces of ████ like eikaiwas. Two, it’s because you guys who work at these ████ing eikaiwas long-term are the kinds of guys who won’t take any ████ing risks. So, you just bow down to these pieces of ███ ████ who run these awful companies and you won’t get out there to break some bones and make things right. These eikaiwa ████s don’t follow the law worth ███! And you know they don’t! So why the ████ should you, but not them, go toting the straight and narrow along the “word of the law”? Things are never going to get better out there and it’s just as much because of you long-term ████ boys as much as it is because of how ████ed up the implementation of Japanese labor law is. Just as much on your ████ing end! 

The number of “risks” that the General Union has taken in regards to tackling eikaiwa problems head on isn’t really up for debate – our track record speaks for itself.

You only need to know a little about the General Union’s history to understand that we’ve been punching far above our weight for the last two decades and, while we’re not miracle workers, we’ve done the best that we could with the resources and strength we’ve had available.

Suffice to say, accusations like this are like water off of a duck’s back.

This time, we bluntly informed them of their hypocrisy and noted that the General Union wasn’t about to debase itself and throw away two decades of reputation for someone random nobody with a burner account and an axe to grind.

They didn’t like that reply much, either.

 Yeah, like I’d give you my real name? What ████ing for? Don’t try to ████ing goad me. Why don’t you give me your full name? ████ing ███hole!

You ████ers being the ███ man’s lap dog is something you know is a big hunk of the problem; and I bet I stood up more to those piece of ████ ████ in more real ways than I bet you ever did on site at any piece of ███ eikaiwa house. I made somewhat of a mess out there and got out as soon as I ████ing could.

You should pull your head out of your ███ for once and see what’s actually going on, but I guess there’s no point in saying that because you and all of those other ████ers out there like you actually like keeping your heads up your █████, don’t you?

This is the exact same ████ I encountered while working at Nova: dumb-███ ████, long-term instructors would bash the company to no end behind the scenes, but they were too ████ing dumb to admit or figure out that they were just as much the cause of the problems at Nova as anything else.

So, they’d be calling Nova a piece of ████ in text messages 5 minutes before walking into the door, but once they were inside the building they were all laughs and smiles and so dedicated to their stupid, ████ing “jobs”. If you can’t see how that’s half of the problem then you’re a total ████ing █████. 

And then they deleted their account. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

***

The moral of the story is simple: (please) don’t be like this guy.

Maybe, just maybe, spare a thought for the volunteers who have to put up with this kind of attitude on a weekly basis, too.

Thanks (to the 9 out of 10 people reading this) for your understanding.