The Filipino in the Workplace

The Filipino in the Workplace

I just started working at a day job. That means I wake up at 5:00 AM and I leave the office at 5:00 PM. My waking hours are Philippine hours. That also means I'm exposed to Philippine mediocrity as well.

Case in point:

10 months ago I started to worked for a U.S. company and the atmosphere back then was very strict and leniency was never a part of my supervisors' vocabulary. Each and every second was timed. Everybody knew where you were and what you were doing at any specific time of the day. Or "night", I should say.

Everything that you did was metered; everything was clockwork. And Hell would freeze over before you could even dare to disrupt the machine that they called a Schedule. Everything was done if and only if you had permission from your supervisor. Anything less than that would warrant a verbal warning or worse, a memo.

Just think about it... At a call center, you had to ask permission before you could piss or eat. It felt more like a prison than an office. Except with this type of prison, the walls are made of plastic and they seem taller than they normally are.

But I am not about to fall into a diatribe. Instead I am here to praise the people who work in a call center. I have realized that it is through hard work that you get to have a sense of dignity and importance as a person. It is through sheer force of will that you learn how to muster enough strength to come to the office everyday while suffering a migraine and high blood pressure. I now realize that what I did back then wasn't torture at all but it was work as how it should be defined, explained and practiced in real life. Back then I never understood the importance of a day's work because all I did was focus on the task at hand: satisfy the customers and make the company look good. The latter part might be too shallow for some people but looking back, I believe it should be taught to each and every Filipino employee. Because most of the time, we Filipinos are guilty of not just slacking off but outright apathy for work itself.

So now I can't really blame government for the troubles our country is facing. I may have given up that right because at my current job, it seems that people aren't giving their best. It seems that the urgency that I myself despised in my previous job is nowhere to be found here. I know it's unfair to compare the two because after all, call centers get the best people to manage the best hardware and software whereas with Filipino companies, we're just barely making ends meet by working with operating systems that are slowly being eclipsed by more streamlined ones. It is a striking contrast; nevertheless, it is true.

I don't mean to compare anything but I just know that we can all become better if we just get our act together and decide that we should be working our asses off because we're the same people who troubleshoot other people's problems thousands of miles away; we're the same people who handle the thousand dollar accounts of respected clients in 50 states; we're the same individuals who take the brunt of a customers bad attitude--and we never even flinch while we talk to them.

We are so much better when we do what we're supposed to do. But right now, we're not. I'm just wondering...is it because we're ashamed to be doing work for our fellowmen or is it because we're ashamed to be branded as "Filpinos"?

Change can happen in a man even before he is sentenced to a prison. In the same light, we can also become more than who we are now. Even if it doesn't mean having to speak a foreign language 24/7.