All your souls are belong to us

[fma_fanatic]

Back around the end of August, an announcement was made that our company would be acquired by another company we do business with; basically we are an authorized reseller of their product. Of course, this set a lot of people on a tizzy with that announcement and the consensus was that we should all update our resumes, people were going to get canned, etc.

So for the last couple of months we've been waiting for the announcement that it would be finalized. It was made on Friday. That's right. Halloween.

Soon after the announcement, there were murmurings of us now being owned by our new parent company. This slowly morphed to "our souls now belong to [Parent Company]" Somehow an e-mail got all the way to corporate that said "all our souls are belong to [Parent Company]". There was a major sales meeting on Monday and one of the first things addressed was that this would stop immediately as it was a very rude thing to do - Parent Company originates in Japan, so it can be viewed as quite offensive.

Now of course, the joke going around is that if we mess up, we'll have to perform seppuku. *sigh* I need to start looking up Japanese work culture and start posting them around the breakrooms. On the plus side, I finally got my wish: I'm working for a Japanese company now. I almost got to work for Mitsubishi many years ago, but they wanted someone with more experience.

[wagegoth]

I was with a company about 15 years ago that was acquired by a Japanese company. We all got to take the Kaizen seminar. It actually was not too bad, except for the overuse of the word paradigm.

As a welcoming gift, they gave us all padded picture frames, the kind that hold several small pictures. No, I don't know why they chose picture frames.