disciple-to-[n]one

losing my armstretch of sky

Saturday, August 30, 2008

 Continuing to play the anti-outsourcing card, Democrat presidential front-runner Barack Obama on Wednesday said while America cannot “shy away” from globalisation, it would have to take measures to ensure that jobs are not shipped overseas.

“We have to stop providing tax breaks for companies that are shipping jobs overseas and give those tax breaks to companies that are investing here in the United States of America,” Obama said. [Source]
 

— We’ve always felt proud that we’re not a typical callcenter, that we’re a subsidized, off-shore location for this “big” American company; yet these market crashes inevitably led to retrenchment, even whole teams/depts were dissolved.

Here’s something I wrote a few months back, the good ol’ secure days:

If I leverage my chair I can see heads, foreheads, the ubiquitous red department labels, the green pillars, exit signs, fire extinguishers, lights, workstation nameplates, the uncloaked ceiling with the water and poo pipelines. I appreciate the fact that the workstations are a rich apple green. Otherwise, I’d be the very creature I feared when I was little.

Years ago, in Economics class, my professor objurgated Filipinos leaving the country because she was so passionately against human capital flight, commonly known as brain drain. Years ago, in the same class under the same professor, we discussed how bpo is a booming industry & that suddenly getting a college diploma does not necessarily equate to a high-paying job. In that same classroom, in the state university I attended, we were forewarned that graduating from AB Economics will not get us a good job; which was a euphemism for: you wasted four years of your life to ceremoniously up the unemployment rate.

Now, here I sit in my own workstation (not the crude cubicle that housed Hiro Nakamura) getting cross-eyed because of my two flat-panel display monitors, earning apparently the same monthly pay a cousin employed in Saudi Arabia is getting; having the leisure to surf the net and video-stream and discover all of the silly, trivial & the glorified imbecility of the online urban jungle. But before you decide that I’m the luckiest procrastinator in the entire workdom; you must know that this auspicious position was reached without sacrificing someone else’s blood & tears, sweat & flesh, saliva and bile, or any enzyme or anatomical  part that we often figuratively use for exaggerative function; it is the result of punctuality, efficiency, being respectful and basically picking up where you left off from your girls scouts days…Here you don’t sell brownies ( We never do that in the Philippines, but for purposes of this discourse please do not dispute), you sell yourself. What you can offer professionally. This being my first job after the university disgorged me (I maintain that although school administrators call us investments, we are in fact by-products of that factory where they get to plunder the allotments as we are crammed in a decrepit classroom with the ventilation of an Alcatraz isolation booth), a lot of colleagues have commented that indeed I’m one lucky bastard (lady) fella to have landed this type of job whereas they’ve been enslaved by a series of companies, never staying longer than 6 months. Owing to how dedicated our professors were & how wonderfully efficient my hippocampus works; I have forgotten the term for that phenomenon of unstable, short-term employment. There’s a single term for that which escapes me now, a thousand biometric scans later. For this narrative let’s just call it “white-collar casualty.” But hey, I won’t settle for just being considered lucky, I want to deserve this motherfucker; and I actually do (can’t hear my supervisors’ dissension).

The last I heard, my professor who was married to anti-brain drain has flown to Singapore and is teaching there. Now that’s an abrupt divorce with a capital D. The last time I checked, the bpo industry has not ceased booming, like the goddamn cockroach population in the eskinita I tread everyday (day, therefore, is night). The last time I checked, my diploma never figured with my employment and my knowledge (what little I have stored) in economics has not been challenged, for there has been no apparent need for what college taught me. Mark Twain has said, I never let school interfere with my education. The last time I checked, I and many others (even the poor grammarians and heavily-accented Pinoys) have not been siphoned into the vortex of bumville.

[sometime between April 21-25, at work]

Posted by discipletonone at 4:55 am | permalink

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