2007.05.13 LIFE --- MY CAREER AND DREAMS: A Year Later

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It has been six months now since I started working for a pseudo-multinational company.  The name sounds multinational but it doesn’t feel like working in a multinational company except that the brand and company name I work with are “multinational”.  Plus the standards set are “multinational”.  But the environment isn’t.

That’s the first comparison with my previous and my current job.

I know it is not right to compare but I just want to contemplate on where I am right now in my career.

Then, I saw bosses clash that added thrill to the job.  Now, I seldom see that.  Part of it is because I am not working in a dynamic and multinational setting – I am isolated from most of my workmates.  What I often see or hear now are employees of the real multinational company behaving as if they are stockholders of my and their company demanding to be treated as VIP’s.  To make things clear, my work has so much to do with giving service.  Anyway, I strongly believe that those employees wanting to be treated as VIP’s should have a change of perspective especially when there are other customers around.  They should not say “taga-name of company” and demand special attention while other customers came first, or something to that effect.  Moreover, what I particularly do not like and have experienced first-hand is when employees of the real multinational company visits the store and do their thing without first consulting the officer-in-charge of the store.  They are not really my bosses.  In fact, I disagree with what my immediate supervisor said referring to an e-mail I mistakenly sent to those people, “Mga big boss yang mga yan, di natin dapat ginagambala ng ganyang e-mail.”  Yeah, duh, so much for employee empowerment.  To truly succeed, they must consider us “partners” in business, and vice versa.  They may be the ones who decide on what must go on with the store, but hey, umph!

That was whining two months ago.

Now, I’m almost into my eighth month with the company.  I’m not whining because of other people anymore.  There are exceptions (maybe many exceptions, in fact) to the situation I described above.

I do not keep track of the number of times I cried over my job.  One time was when I couldn’t go home because I did not want to take a jeep and there were no taxi in the vicinity.  It was anyway difficult as well to ride the jeep because of the time of the night.  Another time was when I did not know what to do with one VIP customer and nobody in that shift knew what to do so I broke down and cried a little bit after the incident.  I also cried (and really cried) over a holiday I had to spend working while 99% of Filipinos went on vacation and my high school friends went to the beach without me despite the fact that I was the one who really wanted it to push through.  Countless times I cried because I miss home, or I wanted to do some weekend getaway but definitely couldn’t, or I was feeling low and tired, or I was feeling pathetic, or I was clamoring for something else but couldn’t really figure out what that something else was.  Now I’m crying again.  As much as I remember, I only cried once with my previous job – a day before my last day with the company and I could even attribute those tears shed to hormonal changes aside from stress.

Yet, I won’t say that my previous work was better than this one.  With my first company, I wanted to quit as early as my first month there.  At least with my current company, I had many months of not disliking waking up to go to work.  I just hate the schedule.

I hated the schedule and the six-day workweek.  I still do.  Now, however, I also hate the direction I’m taking.  I actually couldn’t see myself working for this same company three years from now.  Not even two.  Working as an employee and working almost like a slave for any other company is as well out of the picture for my future.  I tend to become a workaholic, therefore the term slave especially if I wouldn’t love my job.

How would I love my job?  What work would I end up loving?  What?  How?

Shit.  Where am I and where am I going?  Who am I?  Those are very difficult questions.