You'd never know that I thought I was good at writing or not changing tenses and not making grammatical mistakes by reading my last entry.
This is absolutely why people proof-read before publishing. Holy Smokes. I do feel bad for anyone who read the last entry and got completely confused by my less than stellar job.
At any rate, I'll just pick up where I left off:
The first few days in the Phillippines were sort of a blur. I read our entire company training manual, read everyone else's diaries of previous trips, talked to everyone I knew who had been there.
And yet, I was unprepared.
In case you don't know, I was there to train other call center employees. No, no Americans were fired for this. Yes, Americans are still doing the same work at my company. There's just also a Philippines center or two, which really works well for contingency planning.
This was our first time working with this new vendor. The call center culture overseas is pretty much like working here, you know people from other jobs, you find your friends and recruit them to a new company when you find a better job, and eventually, after 10 years, you find yourself working with some of the same people from your prior company at ANOTHER new place, and so on.
So one call center class there was pretty much all recruited to join by one guy. They left E-trade together and came to our vendor firm.
My class was not that class.
I spent a lot of time trying to remember everyone's name, and nickname, because you're not Filipino if you don't have some type of nickname, which doesn't always relate to your Christian name. I also just sat at my computer and tried to figure out what I would be doing.
The other groups of employees going over had very large classes and the other person was always working on catching up the people who were sick or missing. In our class, we were small to begin with and people were sick a lot. Some days, there were only 3 or 4 people. And before I came over, two or three people had quit. So it was sort of a bad sign for the class right away. Usually the center hires about 2x the number of employees they want because they know people will quit during the process, but this vendor promised us employee attrition was not a problem. Obviously they were mistaken.
So anyway, talking about the work part of it is full of political barbs even for me now, one year later.
Let's talk about the hotel!
The hotel was "The Richmonde Hotel", it was only 1 year old in this brand new part of the city. It's a private development squashing the slums and building a posh neighborhood on top of it. We were attached to the shopping mall, a ton of restaurants and stores. It really just felt like Las Vegas or Downtown Disney: Just a planned place to congregate, with corporate buildings nearby.
Restaurants in the Philippines are cheap. By their standards, too, even. If you're looking for a high class, expensive place to eat, you aren't going to find it near our place, though we did go out for a nice steak dinner twice. WHat you will find is a lot of mall food and Johnny Rockets.
Naturally, we ate at our hotel most of the time. And because we should have been sleeping most of the day to get ready for work at night, our quick co-worker plan was to eat breakfast together after our work shift was over.
Breakfast quickly turned into a 2 hour affair every day. The staff at the hotel knew us well, (the employees learn your name on Day 1, it's like "Celebrity Cruises". Going home is not the same, honestly!
We'd eat. And eat. And gossip about work and quickly realized that we probably didn't have much in common.
I was ready to settle down and have a baby. Tim is a private, gay dude who loves to work. Marnie (not her real name) was ready to see all of her friends, since she was born and raised in Philippines, and Kayla (not her real name) was also ready to work hard and prove that she was better than the rest of us.
But these were the only 4 people we knew and thus we had to stick together. I nearly went crazy sometimes when people bragged about what they did in highschool or what they did in college or how much money their parents made.
Seriously. I thought I'd left highschool and college behind. What did I do in HS? I worked a lot. I was in a lot of activities and then my junior year, I switched highschools and tried to rebuild my life, become popular, all while crushed with crippling depression, low self confidence and being my brother & sister's primary daycare source. At least, that was my memory of it. I don't really care if you were in the dance team in college or highschool, or were on the swim team. It's great if you were. But it's not a focal point of adult conversation, but suddenly I felt like I was trying to come up with a great resume for Highschool Achievement. My academic record was pretty strong and on paper, I did a lot of things, but there were plenty of days where I am surprised I made it out of bed and plenty of times where I wished I could just vanish from sight.
Anyway.
We had little in common, but we ate breakfast for hours. Then we went to the gym. And then we went to sleep. Every day--for a few weeks.
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