While sipping a nice hot tea after lunch, hoping to calm down my angry stomach – which is planning a major revolution via a deadly gas attack after I stuff it with an unknown fish soup, banana cue, ampalaya and other for-the-glutton-like-me stuff during lunch, I suddenly notice our company bulletin board. Weird because nobody ever seems to notice it – one of the most ignored thing in our office. Posted on it are the smiling faces of all the employees, forming a pyramid – a typical hierarchical organization chart, telling all the visitors and reminding all the employees who are the gods and the slaves.My mind, which hates doing mental calculation, tried to calculate how long I’ve been here in this company. Whoaaah! Six years. Double check… Double check.. Hmmm February 2003… Oh my gums! Six years and five months? That long? Whew!
I found this company in Jobstreet, a ship crewing, crew management and shipping agent here in the Philippines. I started as a recruitment & training assistant. After a few years, my boss noticed that I’m bored to death – always going to work with a terrible hang-over, always staring at my computer monitor doing nothing and always having the don’t-fucking-disturb-me look. The trick is, I make them rely to me in almost everything so that they can’t just fire me – from e-mail correspondence to file management to guest and trainee relations, hence instead of firing me they transferred me to the Training Division as a registrar and computer instructor.
I few years later I found myself fighting the Peter Principle, already reaching my level of incompetence. Fighting routine work, highly convinced that I’m underpaid and overloaded by tasks not listed in my job description. So I decided to quit. Hoping for a greener and fresher pasture in the academe.
When I’m about to submit my resignation letter, I was offered the rumored-to-be-challenging job as the Executive Assistant of the Chairman of the Board and President.
I accepted the challenge, therefore here I am – learning bits and pieces of business bureaucracy, learning the importance of business protocols as mundane as handing a business card to a Japanese, e-mail etiquette and various business correspondence and the most exciting – observing how managers perspire during the monthly committee meeting.
It’s already a year and a few months – time passes by, continuously learning a few tricks here and there, but the academe has that drawing power over me. I’ll have to wait I guess – hoping for another round of company reorganization.
I accepted the challenge, therefore here I am – learning bits and pieces of business bureaucracy, learning the importance of business protocols as mundane as handing a business card to a Japanese, e-mail etiquette and various business correspondence and the most exciting – observing how managers perspire during the monthly committee meeting.
It’s already a year and a few months – time passes by, continuously learning a few tricks here and there, but the academe has that drawing power over me. I’ll have to wait I guess – hoping for another round of company reorganization.
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