Hi guys — this has been stuck on the drafts lately but with the loss of the website where this was posted, I decided that it’s ripe time to celebrate my 13th year blogging with this post.
This is among the ones I wrote during my time at the school publication ICCT Colleges Newsbytes (not to be confused with Newsbytes.ph of the great IT journalists in the country), and this was published in print at a time where I got back from doing a 5-month work with a local call center doing the basic troubleshooting for a foreign account. Hope you enjoy this post.
It has been two semesters since I wrote for the school paper, and I have been going to school almost once a week before enrollment to arrange my admission. There were times when I approach someone familiar to me and had a talk about how the school has been for the past six months.
Some ask me, “Where have you been?” I simply reply, “I’m working.” Then we will have a short discussion on what kind of work I am into.
Now that I have settled everything and I had left my job to continue my schooling, I’m ready to face a new set of professors again and meet a set of new classmates. But before that, I would like to share three things that I have learned from working at the four corners of the office:
First, you don’t own your time; it is always occupied. You are supposed to work eight hours a day for five days but you need to give a two to three-hour allowance for preparation & transportation. If you’re living in Antipolo, you might spend more than ten hours of your daily life for work — that doesn’t even include your lunch time. If you don’t like your job, you might feel that your weekends are not enough. I learned to schedule everything to meet all the demands of working.
Second, you’ll be living in a fast-paced lifestyle. In the first two to three weeks of your job, you can stroll around or do window-shopping at the mall or surf the internet but you’ll realize in the succeeding weeks that you won’t have any time for that — either you are stressed or you’ll have to do overtime work.
Third, your company depends on you. Unlike in school where you can go astray (petiks); companies, when they hire you, trusts that you will do your best to do everything right — one simple mistake may cost the company thousands of pesos — and unlike in school where you can easily back out, it won’t be easy for you to back out from your employer once you have signed that contract.
Once they get fed up with how poor your performance is, they’ll be referring you to Human Resources and get you terminated. After that, it will be hard for you to find a job. This is similar to a student’s permanent record, in which if you fail / dropped a subject, it will be forever written there — and you can’t make an excuse for that.
These things that I have learned from my first job helped me to cherish my memories of going back to school a lot. What I have thought as a way of spending my time while waiting for the next enrollment schedule became a learning experience for me, and it made me realize that I have to be responsible in everything that I do. With that, I say to myself, “Welcome back to school.”