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Phrase: Rock the boat
Sometimes you can only take so much bullsh**.
Then you have to get things off your chest.
When that happens, you tend to rock the boat.
Japan is a wonderful country.
It’s safe and secure, and nothing much to cause grave concern ever happens here.
That’s the problem.
I used to work for one of the large nationwide English language schools in Japan.
It was a great job with an excellent English teaching system.
The one problem was morning meetings, and I decided to rock the boat.
When you rock the boat, you say or do something that disturbs the status quo; the current situation.
Most people don’t like it when you rock the boat because it upsets the system.
One of the worst things in Japan is that the Japanese LOVE meetings.
Meetings are to a Japanese person what cocaine is to an addict.
One day, while wasting time attending a morning meeting, I asked a question.
I wondered why I had to participate in a Japanese business meeting conducted in Japanese when I am a Canadian English teacher who doesn’t speak Japanese and doesn’t care about the company’s finances.
Honestly, I didn’t care if the company was doing well financially or not.
I was in Japan because my girlfriend (now wife) was Japanese, I am an English teacher, and I needed a visa and money.
Well, I rocked the boat in more ways than one.
First, I asked a question, and foreigners are not supposed to ask questions.
Second, they interpreted my questioning as endangering the very raison d’être of the branch manager.
However, from then on, I didn’t have to attend any more meetings.
Rocking the boat made me persona non grata, and I enjoyed it.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 74.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.