I am sat in my flat at 8:55am on a Tuesday, dressed, fed, watered, and ready to be a hostage. Because today is the day the air conditioner repair man comes. He will arrive, I am reliably informed, sometime between 9am and 6pm. That is the appointment. That is the entire fucking appointment. Booking a repair with any Japanese utility or telecoms company in 2026 doesn't get you a time. It gets you a day. A nine-hour arrival window, presented with a straight face, as though that is a normal thing to ask of a grown adult with a job.

Nine hours. Think about that. That is a working day. That is a transatlantic flight. That is, in some prefectures, an entire shift in the salaryman gulag. And they have offered me precisely none of it back. No morning slot, no afternoon slot, no "he's our third call so probably elevenish, mate". Just the void between sunrise and the end of business, into which a man may or may not materialise to look at a thing for four minutes.

And then. Then. This morning, at 8:40am, the phone rang. A lovely, polite, immaculately-trained voice. Calling to confirm. Confirm what, precisely? The appointment I already have? Yes. And what is the appointment? "Between nine and six." So you've rung me, twenty minutes before the window opens, to read the window back to me. To confirm the void. Cheers for that. Truly the work of a sovereign nation's finest minds. I now have less information than I started with, because I've also learned they have my number and aren't afraid to use it.

Why the nine-hour repair window survives in Japan

Here is the bit that does my head in. This is the country that runs the Shinkansen to an average delay of under a minute. They can land a bullet train on a coin. They can tell you, to the second, when the 7:42 will leave Shinjuku, and it will, and a man will bow if it doesn't. The logistical precision exists. It's right there. They just won't point it at your AC. The entire apparatus of Japanese punctuality, the thing the tourist board won't shut up about, evaporates the instant the appointment involves coming to your house. For that, you get the granularity of a medieval pilgrimage. "He'll be along when he's along. Pray."

And you can't push it. You can't ring back and go "any chance of a window within the window?" because the person on the phone genuinely cannot give you one and will apologise so beautifully, so sincerely, with such a flawless cascade of sumimasen, that you end up apologising back. You, the customer, who has done nothing, end up saying sorry to the company that has stolen your Tuesday. That's the masterstroke. The politeness is the cage. They are so unfailingly, immaculately courteous about ruining your day that getting angry feels like you're the wanker.

And then there is NTT

But all of this, the air conditioner, the void, the confirmation call confirming nothing, is mere warm-up. Because the boss level of this entire bloody genre is getting the internet installed by NTT.

NTT internet installation is not an appointment. It is a campaign. It is a four-act tragedy that unfolds across multiple separate visits by multiple separate men who, I am increasingly certain, are not allowed to speak to one another. One bloke comes to look. Just look. He looks at the wall, sucks his teeth, fills in a form, and leaves. A second man comes, on a different nine-hour-window day, to do something to the pole outside. A third comes to do the bit inside. And there is always, always, a fourth, summoned because something the first three did or didn't do requires a man to come and undo it. Four visits. Four stolen Tuesdays. To plug in the internet. In the country that invented the home games console. For fuck's sake.

Each visit, naturally, comes with its own nine-hour window. Each one preceded by its own pointless confirmation call. By the time you are actually online you have aged visibly, sacrificed half a month of annual leave, and developed a Pavlovian flinch at the sound of a Hilux pulling up outside. These absolute clowns have turned "the internet works now" into a multi-week endurance event, and they do it with a laminated pamphlet and a bow.

It's 5:51pm. The AC man has not come. The window closes in nine minutes. I have not been productive. I have not left the flat. I have been a prisoner of a man who, I now suspect, was never coming at all. Somewhere, a phone is ringing. It'll be them. Confirming.