Thursday, October 19, 2006

When Dog Bites

IT WAS A sunny morning when a dark furred german shepherd named Viper and a gullible maid went out for a walk. They were few meters away from their home when suddenly a group of fangs fell in love with a right lower limb. It was as if the teeth just discovered how to munch a strangers' foot for the first time when it willfully bit into the pants. The dog perpetrator must have seen a walking luscious beef so it buried its fangs right into the target.
The fangs belong to Viper and the right lower limb was mine.
I must have waken up at the wrong side of my futon. Part of my daily routine is to walk a couple of blocks to join Pizza before heading towards HICAP. Having done this a thousand times, I've never met a major accident nor simpy trip over a stair. It was this one fateful day that my daily routine would entirely be disturbed.
Marla was the maid and she came all over from Cebu. She is already on her eight month serving his boss domestic needs prior to yesterday. I've learned these details when I decided to take off from work and have myself checked with humans in white robes, or sometimes called doctors. I was stormed with warnings and scary thoughts of getting infected with a deadly rabies and after several years just die a sudden death. Thanks to my dear colleagues for they catapulted me to have myself immediately vaccinated.
The plan was to go to fortmed clinic and seek an advice of a doctor. But before having myself logged into the registry, the nurses quickly pushed me to go into a certain RITM.
"RITM who?," I ask the nurse I was conversing with. She blinked and sighed a deep empy breath while uttering the same question. She sought help from several other nurses lurking around but they weren't able to save her from an ocean of embarassment.
RITM stands for Research Institute for Tropical Medicine. As the name suggests, it is the branch of the government that seeks cures for different kinds of tropical diseases resulting from venomous animal bites such as cats, snakes, dogs, etc. I was too dumb to realize that such institution exists. Thanks to Viper, I gained an additional Wikipedia knowledge into my brain.
I went back to the house where the dog sleeps. Marla was the only person present when I came. Her face was innocent and suggested that I rub it with vinegar and garlic to cleanse the bruise and wash away the rabies. I couldn't laugh at her supposed witty comments under a blistering 11 AM sun, so I am left with an option to call his boss and tell the whole damn story.
The dog was regularly checked up and vaccinated, and so the owner attested. Nothing to fear, nothing to worry about. He added that he would willingly take me to the dog clinic where Viper used to get shots. But my position was in deep pit and I am not taking any chance at all. I was just bitten by a dog and it caused me a lot.
My day was shattered. I was forced to go undertime which caused me half a day's pay. My phone bill will soon skyrocket causing me additional burden due to calls I had made here and there. I painstakingly had to absorb the heat of the sun, rode in one of those God forsaken tricycles streaming in the hell-like-highways. And after agreeing with the nurses financial conditions, my torso, shoulders and skin were tortured with painful injections. Now I have to eagerly convince myself that I need to flush antibiotics into my stomach thrice a day.
Now tell me what have I done wrong to have all these occured to me?
Tomorrow, I will read my horoscope.

Friday, October 6, 2006

Call Center

How does a call center located in the jungles of Makati sound to you? Very okay I guess. Right at the heart of the business capital.

How does a call center situated in the Mall of Asia appeal to you? Quite exciting. You'll have the nth chances of watching Superman Returns in iMax
format.

How does a call center in Baguio City, Clark, or any other busy districts elsewhere excites your senses? Hmmm. Not bad maybe.

Just one more.

How does a call center spaced in a house from little less known and quiet residential village called Belair appear to your taste? By now, instinct should utter a loud gasp of hollow guess coupled with an inch of wondering what on earth is it doing there.

I've got several friends who works in that booming industry with a great deal of pay as most of them chided. Some were engineering graduates and licensed too, to make it more profound. While others have finished accountancy and business management courses whose weapon of survival is their capacity to speak fluent english dressed in a foreign accent, that if you hear them speak you would thought it was someone born in London. When I was still unemployed, I tried submitting my resume to a very popular call center but failed to convince the interviewer of my ability to express myself well and I ended up being a factory worker.

As it turned out, these call centers capitalized on agents a.k.a. customer care representatives a.k.a. modern day telephone operators on their ability to speak the universal language. They speak in behalf of companies for customers with concerns to their products or services, but I guess that is another topic for a future post.

They have somewhat turned into zombies who are always awake when the world is sleeping. If they haven't learned the word independence yet, they described themselves as boarders in their own houses where chance upon talking with their parents before they lay onto their matress in the morning or head for work in the eve.

But the issue here is a call center amidst a suburb like a lost command of an infantry batallion making forming its own army in the forest of the wilderness. Whenever i strut along Stockton street, I often times grab an opportunity to glimpse to this call center during its pristine time. I
witnessed the house reformation, it used to be one of the abandoned units where only tall grasses dwell.

One fine morning, I walked along the same path leading to my own sanctuary. Suddenly, a loud conversation was looming and succeeded in capturing my attention. I thought somebody was at cold war after an evening of downpour and the pavement still have traces of moisture. The loud voice almost failed to die down like that of a stream of water flowing down the river bed. He was wearing boxers and a polo and I think it was the boss with a low baritone voice trying to mimick an English accent.

Sooner, several people came and filled the call center converted house like flies rummaging over a piece of lefover cheese cake. I guess these are the operators and one day they busied themselves outside the house group into two. They appeared to be given the task of improving their speeches by blabbering with one another as if they were speaking with a customer. I
witnessed this while holding a book about the memoirs of a geisha named Sayuri and acted reading the book as if I was ignoring the things that they do.

I just wonder how do they satisfy their craving for food at the most unimaginable wee hours of the morning since they are literally very far from 7-11, neither a sari-sari store nearby would open at that time. And I can't think of what the adjacent neighbors reaction, since most people who chose to live there required a quiet community and never wished to be disturbed particularly at night.