These days most of my regular job is teaching at my school. I say most because I still make money from photography and translation jobs, but teaching has gradually become the main thing. I suppose I should have expected that when I started my own school.

My teaching work has followed current trends. That is to say, when COVID happened, a lot of my classes moved online. An interesting consequence of that is that I started taking on students from other places in Japan, sometimes pretty far away: for example, I have two current students who live in Hokkaido, which is several hours away from where I am.

All of Japan is on the same time zone, so it's all well and good and not confusing. Maybe you can see where I'm going with this. During COVID I soon found myself taking on students outside of Japan. At first this was mostly from Korea and Taiwan. These are only an hour different from Japan, so it's not too difficult to figure out. But it wasn't long before I expanded from here and found students in India and Bangladesh (yes, they speak English in those countries as a second language, but they wanted specific training help from me). I then had a student who works at Nissan be transferred to the US (to Michigan) for three years and he asked to continue my lessons. I agreed. This opened the door to teaching other Japanese students who were currently working for a year or two in America, and that's a mess of time-zones right there (four of them!).

You know, in the past few years I've done pretty good keeping all these time-zone straight on my schedule, but I was bound to mess up eventually. I made a contract with a Brazilian family currently living in Texas, but somehow for my availability I converted wrong and told them times I am busy and/or asleep. So yeah, now I'm trying to work that out with them. I don't speak any Portuguese and their English is terrible (hence why they hired me), which just adds to the scheduling problems.

Whew...

The internet is amazing, don't get me wrong. And the ability to work remotely is great. But dealing with multiple time-zones can really be a headache...

Have any of you had to deal with time zone scheduling problems like this?

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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.