Career Opportunities
So it is still Friday, my last Friday posting…
Thanks to Rob and Gordon for the invitation!!!
I was 20 years old when I had my first 9 to 5 job, and I promised to my self I wouldn’t try it again. The process of getting a job is just as bad as the actual working experience.
I was fresh out of high school, I had all this plans and working to get some money seemed like the short way to accomplish what I wanted. I was told wouldn’t get no first month pay since I’d be learning how everything worked but was promised to be paid after that since I would then be experienced. After the first week I started producing money for that company, finishing up jobs on my own, and I wasn’t getting any money on my pocket. So by the time my second working month was about to finish with no pay and no signs of it, I went to the owner and told him I wasn’t going to work there anymore. The guy didn’t ask why, I don’t even think he said anything.
After that I spent almost 9 years without working, the year 2006 came and I found my self working cleaning an office from 9 pm to 12 am was taking out the trash from every office, dusting the desks, cleaning board and table on the meeting room, washing dishes and reorganizing the refrigerator, and then finish the night by vacuuming the hole carpet. So I guess is considered a night job.
Then worked at a Hotel moving caned and fresh food from the storage containers or from the coolers to the different kitchens, that one job was more like an all day job, Monday thru Sunday I was working from 6 am until 2 am. Guess it was good after all since I didn’t have any time to spend the money I was being paid.
After that I worked at a Mortgage Company, that was supposed to be the 9 to 5 job, but it was more like as long as I was required type of job. Filing papers, filling some other papers, making sure applications were properly filled, making calls to different banks, and just being polite on the phone all day long.
“Vintage Group Mortgage. This is Rafael, how may I help you?”
In the beginning of 2007 I went back to work at the Hotel and that was it.
Since then I’ve been officially unemployed (again).
I have never had the drive to get a job, the only thing that motivates me to do so is to experience a situation in which I have never been, and also the chance to stop my head from thinking all day long. Neither the pay nor the job have ever felt right; so I prefer to spend my days and nights inside my house, instead of enrolling on a dead end job.
It is the beginning of June 2011, and I am completely aware of where I am and what I have to do to leave again. But the most important thing is I am not wishing I were somewhere else, as I once did.
So yesterday thirteen years after that first time I had to go hand a job application I went ahead and experienced (again) what I said I wouldn’t.
Got to the place at 10:30 in the morning filled out some papers and went on to take a test on a computer for a customer service thing.
Long story short, I am applying for a call center job.
So I spent six hours inside that room, sitting on uncomfortable chairs answering dumb tricky questions, and putting up with a patronizing attitude. Think I got hired I have to go back in less than seven hours to a last interview and have to take some papers with me.
This time I have a purpose, and there’s something else driving me than the promise of a better life or buying my self, useless things I know I can live with out.
I spent a whole day looking at those faces, standing behind a front desk acting like they own me even before they hire me, playing power moves on those who need a job. Then turn around and took a look at the other faces, those from high school kids trying to get a job to get some money, and the faces of unemployed people like me, just as old as me, looking desperate and willing to leave behind the embarrassment of speaking a language that some of them barely understand, but they still stand there and pretend they do, Wearing their suits and ties and their worn out shoes.
