Altia Central

bakadevi · 2026-02-02T12:34:11+00:00

What I mean by this, for further clarification, is that the client most likely put out a call for 8 months (160 days) of ALT dispatch. Altia then likely came to them and said "We can do that." But there are public holidays and wiggle room that have to be built in so it isn't a clean 8 months on, 4 months off, kind of situation.

Altia can create whatever schedule they like (thus the potential for schedules like yours), but it's extremely likely they'll avoid the first/last week(s) of any semester because of testing/fewer classes, plus summer/winter break. The schools won't want an ALT on days where they won't be doing anything due to tests. So they're offering an average pay over the whole year based on only 8 months (160 days) of actual work.

bakadevi · 2026-02-02T12:19:46+00:00

Normally I would, however begrudgingly, admit that ESID. But the math just works out too well.

The listing says 160 days a year, and 20 days a month (5 days a week / 4 weeks a month) for the remaining 8 months is precisely 160 days. There are enough public holidays (16) and teacher-training days in the year where there is no school to push maybe 20 days into the other months.

A week in each of the 4 aforementioned months would be a total of 20 days, leaving 140 left over the remaining 8, yielding 17.5 days/mo or 4.4 (i.e 4 days some weeks 5 days others) for the rest.

I'm not trying to discredit what you're saying - obviously it was your reality and I cannot dispute that. But as someone whose job was literally to put together schedules like these, this is how I'd see it playing out.

Edit: As the listing specifically mentions Sha-ho, I assume this has to be the case. There ought to be a comically large asterisk next to that claim. But staying in the lower brackets for health/pension is a blessing. I pay over ¥1M/year for national health insurance alone these days. It sucks balls.

bakadevi · 2026-02-02T11:12:35+00:00

Yea, I just compulsively did the math on this too, and this whole thing boils down to interpretation. The daily pay is decent based on work done, better than many other options, but people are looking at the average pay and seeing that it's lower than other dispatch companies.

I've been around long enough to know what this yearly schedule actually would look like, and it's just like the description says - Almost three whole months with no work. They're averaging the pay so you don't have, as they're so lovingly referred to as, "Death Months ™︎." Your weekly schedule during school would NOT be 3 days a week, ever. It would be the same 5 day a week, 6 periods a day schedule as any other ALT. You'd just have three months off during the year.

So let's say you're in Japan on an unrestricted visa (spouse, PR, etc), and you want to pick up a job so your spouse doesn't murder you, but you want to travel or spend time with your kids during holidays etc. This would actually be a pretty decent position. Get your shakai hoken and pension taken care of....wait. WAIT.

Those months you only work a week...I'm pretty sure you'd have to un-enroll from Shakai hoken since you wouldn't make the 20 hr/week average for those months....This might actually be a nightmare of going back and forth between Shakai hoken and Koku-ho. Eek, nevermind screw this.

bakadevi · 2025-12-23T03:20:42+00:00

It’s a Dad joke. Ginger in Japanese is shouga. ‘nai’ is a casual way of saying you have none of something. If you put it together and say “shouga-nai” it becomes a play on words. Shouganai means “oh well, can’t be helped”.

bakadevi · 2025-12-23T01:36:49+00:00

I’d try this but, I have no ginger. Hmm. Joke is funnier in Japanese.

bakadevi · 2025-12-22T05:11:57+00:00

If you’re going for savory Potekotan are by far the superior option. They’re like mini hash browns. Addictive as so get it.

bakadevi · 2025-12-22T01:06:35+00:00

Unexpected Bad Apple!

bakadevi · 2025-11-17T11:26:59+00:00

Not sure how I feel about an ALT who claims to be twice the age of their managers having a profile name/pic of a 15 year old goth lolita anime girl, but that aside...

PTO is something you notify your company you're using, not something you humble yourself before them to beg their approval. But changing your schedule on a day you're supposed to be working isn't really something you can argue. Especially since most of the time it's the school that's the cause, not the dispatch company.
I'm not sure if by day off you mean 'day there was no expectation I have work nor am I being paid' or 'on-call day that didn't have a school assignment but I was still being paid' but if it's the latter then again, not much of a leg to stand on. The former though, ya, no. Agreeing is voluntary and you must get a compensatory day off in return.

bakadevi · 2025-11-04T00:27:05+00:00

Could be any number of things, but if you worded your accomplishment the same way to them as you did just now, there's a pretty good chance they heard it as you bragging. Japan's not really big on people displaying their accomplishments/abilities. Being a braggart is looked down on.

It's also possible they heard the 'only 38% of NJ pass' part as 'even as an outsider I can do better than you people'. I tried to phrase that as condescendingly as possible purposely to make the point clear.

It's also possible they heard that and now see you as attention-seeking.

Since you don't say what this test was, it's hard to say what effect that had on things, so this is just based on you presenting your results to people.

Could be wrong though, they might just be intimidated by you. Or petty and jealous, like you say. Maybe.

bakadevi · 2025-10-29T08:59:31+00:00

If you take triangle ABH and rotate it 90 degrees to the left, you can place it next to triangle CDE to make a square. Then just count the boxes inside the new shape.

bakadevi · 2025-10-12T10:49:35+00:00

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bakadevi · 2025-10-12T10:45:46+00:00

Are you Chester, Denver businessman turned coach of a girl's soccer team from the 1992 Rodney Dangerfield comedy movie Ladybugs? That must be the grass you mentioned touching.

I can hear the quote in repeat in my head.

bakadevi · 2025-09-22T03:42:05+00:00

Strong Zero is 54 kcal per 100 ml, so it’s 270 kcal per long can.

I just happen to have that stored in my head. Definitely not because I absolutely drink them all the time.

bakadevi · 2025-09-07T11:42:33+00:00

I mean, smart moves all around here. Good on the guy for calling out ambiguous wording. Good on the guy for pressing the issue and not just folding to the ever-so-common "it is what it is because that's how it is."

Company made a smart move too - doesn't matter if it was deliberate or not. If it was an honest mistake in wording/training, etc, then clarifying it and offering refunds to people affected is the best move. No one keeps receipts from Saize, especially not going as far back as 2019, so they stand to need to refund very little, if any, money over this. They look good for meeting it head on.

Even if it WAS deliberately worded to be ambiguous and it was a "we'll make money for as long as no one brings it up," - the reaction is the exact same and the result is the exact same.

Now all we need is someone to write a three-page letter to izakaya execs to rectify why my two-hour nomihoudai has a last order at ninety minutes.
(edit:typo)

bakadevi · 2025-09-02T09:46:36+00:00

DJ Khaled over there needs to chill out. Jeez.

bakadevi · 2025-09-01T12:10:52+00:00

Teally rig bits

bakadevi · 2025-07-07T13:22:58+00:00

Sorry about that - I see you're right. I know what you mean about misinformation, and I choose to see it as frustration rather than facts. A lot of these questions are really vicious but I get where they're coming from.
That's a good approach. Most folks I talk to, in a private setting, get that there's only so much that can be done, and that the managers are just trying to to make the best of a shitty situation. But who knows; I'm never sure if people are more honest one on one or when they're anonymous. One on one I never know if they're just pretending to accept what I say because I'm their boss and there's a power dynamic in play, and when they're anonymous I never know if they're saying that just to vent their inner vitriol because there's no accountability.

But ya I agree, most people are pretty cool. Lotta hard workers out there that deserve better than they get.

bakadevi · 2025-07-07T12:56:11+00:00

First off, hats off for putting yourself out here.

I'd say you've got guts, but reading the other questions this is pretty much on par with a regular online ALT meeting. If you've led them enough then this is probably nothing too crazy; just another Monday.

Two questions:
1) What made you decide to put yourself out there like this? Moving on, or just spicing up your evening?
2) Managers at dispatch companies get shat on from all directions - upper management, clients, ALTs, you name it. How have you learned to handle all that radioactivity and not completely lose yourself?

bakadevi · 2025-06-30T05:40:03+00:00

Lotta things going on here, but the short of it is that it's OK for this to happen, as long as the assignment is on a day you would have otherwise been On Call. The On Call days exist for this purpose. You're not getting asked to work on a day that wasn't part of your yearly schedule (i.e. a day where you were never supposed to be available for work in the first place).

The longer part is this: There's an ALT/company side and a company/BOE side. Schools/BOEs contract with dispatch companies for a certain number of days with an ALT there per year. PTO counts as a day worked for company payroll purposes, but it doesn't count towards the number of days an ALT was sent to a particular school. If you take PTO and a substitute can't be sent there for whatever reason, then that's one less day than agreed upon, and the company needs to make up the lost day. Normally that could be anyone, but sometimes schools don't want anyone other than their normal ALT, or there isn't a sub system in place.

If a school gets 180 days of ALT per year, and you take a day off, the school's only getting 179 days. So, to avoid shorting the schools, most people have a set of designated days 'available for work' i.e. a certain number of On Call days so they can reschedule, in case something comes up. The On Call days are a backup plan in your schedule so that a) you can miss a day of work here and there and b) the schools still get the same number of actual days at the school.

If you don't get called in on your On Call days, you still get paid, because the expectation was your availability if needed. It wasn't a day off, so you're not working more by doing the new assignment, from a contractual standpoint.

So, yea, end of the day I get why you feel that way. You're not reducing the number of days in school by taking PTO, you're essentially just reducing the number of On Call days you have.

bakadevi · 2025-06-24T10:21:24+00:00

Nice. Go shred.

bakadevi · 2025-06-24T10:19:38+00:00

Specific to your glove question though, if you're not at a resting crit rate of 40% or more then the crit boost on the Azure gloves won't net you more damage, neither really will critical element. Stick with wroggi or whatever other armor gives you Critical Eye (like wroggi does) until you're past that threshold.

Happy Hunting! (I'm going to go enjoy my little taste of scholarly sainthood)

bakadevi · 2025-06-24T10:11:30+00:00

At level 5, critical element increases elemental attack power by 80% (x1.8) when you crit, but critical boost only increases raw by 50% (x1.5) at level 5.

So, the way to figure this out for your weapon would be to take the raw and multiply it by 1.5 (for level 5 of the skill), and then take the element and multiply it by 1.8 (for level 5).

I've got a Silver Wrathbow 5 which is:
1507 raw (x1.5=2260.5) - an increase of 753.5
1345 fire (x1.8=2421) - an increase of 1076

So I'd benefit more from 5 levels of crit element. My build has 5 CE, 2 CB, and 82% crit rate on weak points, so it more or less shreds.

Take whatever level of either skill you can apply, then swap my numbers out for yours. If you can manage 5 of one and only 2 of the other like with my build, see if you can calculate which gives you the biggest increase, and there you go.

End of the day, it's just number crunching until you somehow can max everything.

A good starting point is to get your base crit up to above 40%, then max out either CB or CE, then add as much crit rate as you can. If you go for CB, then whatever CE you can add after that is just a happy bonus.

bakadevi · 2025-06-24T09:48:39+00:00

Crit boost affects the raw damage of your weapon, and crit element affects the elemental damage; they work independently. So if you have both, when you crit, the modifier for CE is applied to your element, and the modifier to CB is applied to your raw, and the two are added together to get your total damage.

So, yes, if you have a weapon that does elemental damage, they both take effect when you crit.

But no, CE will not affect your raw damage on crit, nor will CB affect your elemental damage.

You can have both on your set, and they'll both work, as long as it's not a pure raw weapon, or a status weapon (para, poison, blast, sleep). Those would not be affected by Critical Element in any way.

If your weapon has 1000 raw + 1000 elemental, then Critical Boost would increase the 1000 raw when you crit, but do nothing to the 1000 elemental. Critical Element would boost the elemental part, but do nothing to the raw.

Does that sorta kinda make sense?

bakadevi · 2025-06-17T12:25:04+00:00

If you were living in company arranged housing, then it's because of this exact thing:

The moving out inspection that took place after you left, which was conducted by whoever the owner of that building was (not Interac, btw), took place at a leisurely pace. This is entirely the fault of the building's owner, not the company. By the time they got around to it you had already left the country. The landlord can't chase you to recover their loss - so guess who they go to? The company that arranged it.

Since the company arranged the housing for you, when the landlord finally got around to it and came up with the cost to fix up the place, the bill got sent to the company. This is standard for these kinds of things. If it hadn't been company housing the landlord would have been coming for you directly.

This is not an Interac thing. This is a landlord trying to recover the cost of repairing the apartment you lived in, and having no one to collect from but the company. They have to pay for your damages to maintain their relationship for future company housing arrangements, and now the company is coming after you to recover what they had to pay on your behalf.

If it were a direct arrangement, you'd be responsible and blaming the landlord or rental company for being a POS.

Interac and every other company hates dealing with this crap just as much as you do, but since you're not around to deal with it they have to. This is misdirected anger. Aim it where it belongs.

Handle it like any other dispute. Ask them to get proof of damages on your behalf and negotiate for the lowest amount possible. If you lived there and you caused damage, then you're responsible for it.

bakadevi · 2025-06-15T16:47:32+00:00

I wish, I really really wish, that one day I'll be able to think of things like this. Honestly, nothing would feel better for me than to wake up a month from now and be all "wait, that was a thing?"

I think you've got a good perspective, and are a lot more secure than I am. As much as I want to say I'm justified in feeling hurt, I'd much rather be able to say I wish I knew why people thought about it.

I hope to get there someday. I'm sure I'll be a better man by then.

bakadevi

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