After Kuwait, I kept handling this and that while gradually getting more comfortable with the interactive gear.
Just two months later, a photo kiosk job came in from Jack Daniel’s — location: Japan.
The job was installing a photo kiosk in the middle of a scorching Japanese summer rock festival.
The basic flow — take a photo, upload it, send it to the user — was standard stuff, but what made it fun was three concepts: turning the user’s photo into a framed piece of wall art hanging in a mock Jack Daniel’s bar; a graffiti wall where a cleaner comes and wipes it off with a rag, revealing the user’s photo underneath; and a dark rock-concert venue where the lights come up and the user’s photo appears on the big screen to cheering crowds.
Setting up a small green screen for each, shooting, keying it out, pulling corner-tracking data from After Effects into Flash and mapping it all — I lost track of time, it was that fun.
Japan was Japan, through and through.
We stayed in Tokyo for 2-3 days, went to the Jack Daniel’s venue and ran a demo for a few hours, then headed out to the region where the rock festival was happening.
What was funny was that the kiosk was pretty big and heavy, and a crew of Japanese workers was brought in to unload it and carry it down to the basement.
No exaggeration — about ten small Japanese guys, calling out in unison,
“yosa, yosa,”
moved in perfect sync like a single organism.
Marcus — a big, strong guy himself — was watching them with this genuinely charmed look on his face, and watching him watch them, a laugh just slipped out of me on its own.
On the festival side, some gorgeous event staff sent over by Jack Daniel’s ran the two days of the show, and Marcus spent the whole time grinning ear to ear staring at them.
After day one wrapped, a revision request came in: mask the user’s mobile phone number field with asterisks, like a password.
It got approved without anyone consulting me, and I had to have it done that same night — except everyone was heading out for a team dinner with the Jack Daniel’s crew, yakiniku.
I said I’d go too.
Someone asked, then when are you going to do the work?
What kind of way is that to run things, you absolute — if you’re the director, either don’t take on work like this, or stay up and code it with me.
Anyway, I got a bit heated about it, told them not to worry about me, and went to dinner with everyone.
Drank a good amount, got back to the hotel, showered, and started coding drunk.
It wasn’t as simple as just setting a
“password”
attribute like you’d do in HTML today — I had to build actual logic in a Flash text field: catch the key-up event, store the value character by character as it’s typed, and display asterisks in its place instead.
After a short nap, I was at the venue doing a content update and finally catching my breath when David showed up.
David was TCS’s business salesperson, and he’d stopped by the venue while he happened to be in Korea for other work.
It was insanely hot, and David bought me a Canadian Club, and by the time the coolness of that wore off, another one showed up.
We settled into the shade and spent the whole day chatting.
We must have gone through more than ten cocktails.
The sun was going down, the event wrapped up, and the event was a flop.
The reason: a total misread of the user base.
Maybe 20 people participated over the two days?
A disaster caused by completely failing to account for how shy Japanese people are, how strongly they avoid putting themselves forward in front of others.
That urgent request to hide the phone number field came from exactly that same reason — but by then it was too late, and honestly the whole direction had been wrong from the start.
I worked on a Fisher & Paykel brochure touchscreen — building out the product detail pages.
We shipped it to Melbourne for installation on-site.
The day before opening, the office got a call: the touch wasn’t working.
I remote-connected to check the device and software status — everything looked fine, but they insisted it wasn’t working.
Tried rebooting.
Still nothing.
Tried everything I could think of.
Marcus booked the first flight out the next morning.
Told me to go handle it.
Alone?
Kind of scary, kind of exciting, honestly.
Barely slept.
Got up at 4am, caught the 6am flight, landed at 7:30, took a taxi to the Melbourne exhibition venue, and couldn’t find it anywhere.
Called the client.
They were kind enough to come meet me at the entrance.
I checked the screen — nothing worked no matter what I tried.
Powered it off and on, unplugged and replugged the touch USB, ran Windows updates, went into Device Manager and disabled anything that might be conflicting with the built-in touch functionality… spent an hour stuck there and gave up.
Called the office.
“Nothing’s working, what do I do? Pretty sure the touchscreen itself is defective.”
Marcus said there was nothing else to do, and that he’d explain the situation to the client and try whatever he could from his end.
The client still had no idea what was going on — as far as they knew, I was just diligently working on fixing it.
Anyway, I’d given up too, and before heading back to the airport figured, well, it should at least look nice — grabbed some wet wipes lying around and started wiping down the front glass, the sides, every corner.
Ha — and then, suddenly, the touch came back to life.
Dust had built up on the infrared emitter, blocking the infrared signal, which of course meant no touch response.
The client thinks I fixed it.
“Oh, thank you so much, Amuro.”
I don’t think my steps have ever been lighter than they were walking home that day.
It’s 2014, and it’s about time to file for the visa — except a problem came up.
The company’s revenue wasn’t hitting the numbers needed to sponsor the visa.
On top of that, my salary had been reported low for tax purposes.
The boss’s answer was that we’d probably need to wait another 9 months before two years of my salary would actually meet the 457 visa requirements.
I knew it, I just knew something would go wrong — things had been going too smoothly.
Fine, I could wait 9 months, sure, but it’s not like I had any control over the company’s revenue.
Things didn’t turn out to be going well after all.
We landed some serious projects — MTV Social Wall, Levi’s Commuter, Warner Brothers’ Man of Steel — but apparently we still weren’t meeting the requirement.
Honestly, I couldn’t fully believe it.
Was this some scheme to keep me locked in longer, loyally grinding away on the cheap?
Or had they made some real accounting mistake and gotten themselves into trouble?
As a lowly rank-and-file employee, I had no access to whatever league they were playing in among themselves.
My uneasy work life just kept going — or really, I was probably the only one who was actually anxious about any of it.
Ta-daa~ In October, the whole company suddenly got busy prepping for some big project.
Usually it’s a few pages of proposal, a pitch, and you win the work — but this time the scale was different.
The boss, the director, the planner, the designer, me — everyone piled on and worked hard, over and over: revise, add supporting documents, go to a meeting, come back, add more documents again — until we landed the Asian Cup Fan Fest national tour.
A whopper.
A million-dollar job came through.
This is it.
God had come down to help.
The visa front lit up green, and we started the process of moving from a 457 to an ENS (permanent) visa.
Whatever you need, bring it all, I’ll do every bit of it!!!!!!