"Hand and Foot" at Work

Of course I am not REALLY playing cards (or To-ram-pu as they say in Japanese) at school, but I try to keep myself entertained at the workplace.

So in the card game of Hand and Foot, each player needs 26 cards at the beginning of every round. The cards can be taken from any number of piles, but there is a catch. If a player can collect exactly 26 cards by calculation of weight, height, and "feel", then that player's team gets 100 bonus points that round. If both team members get exactly 26, the team gets 200 points. Thrilling.

So at work, I have to make a lot of copies... A LOT of copies... I may be responsible for the deforestation of Japan. Well, I use recycled paper at least but still... I have 523 students. Did you get that? FIVE HUNDRED TWENTY-THREE STUDENTS! And one, ONE, me!
There are 5 classes of sophomores, 6 classes of juniors, 5 classes of seniors. Of the total 16 classes, I have 13 of them, but only teach 12 times a week because two classes only meet every other week. ANYHOW! The point is 523 students in all, approximately 37-41 per class, and I have worksheets and word banks and gamecards galore.

So in the copy room, I play a little "Hand and Foot". If I can pick up the exact number of sheets of paper that I need for a class, I donate 100 yen (about 94 cents) into my arcade fund. There is a fun arcade on the 2nd floor of JUSCO (Japanese Walmart) that requires patrons to buy tokens to play the games and some are very addicting. My favorite game is the dinosaur-digital slots-push over piles of tokens game. One time, I got a jackpot of 500 tokens! I only paid for 45 tokens and felt that I got my fair share of entertainment from them so I shared my winnings with a lot of elderly people sitting around me who were cheering when I won. The tokens can be redeemed for prizes and I THINK that there is a "black market" of sorts to exchange the prizes for money. But I am too nervous to ask about that... I know they are around the Pachinko places (another story, another time, but certainly worth telling).

What was the point of this post? OH YEAH! Hand and Foot at work... so in the copy room...