Filipino Pride

30 minutess before going to work and I'm trying to post my first Blog. "Work" - Up to this day I still consider my line of work as a bad predicament of how we Filipinos will do everything and anything. "Call Centers" - How many of us are working in this field? How many lives looked better and how many families has it built, maintain, & sadly... ruined?

Some would call it easy money. It can be compared to working abroad without leaving your country. Why? Because we supply our services to foreigners. Sometimes some had to lie about their nationality and where they're really based to avoid scrutiny and worse, discrimination. But at this point, I think the whole world knows call centers are most likely located in Asia. India alone has made a name for itself supplying its manpower. The Philippines is one of its contenders.

But has anyone considered its impact on Filipino morale? Yes you never left the country, but who are you delivering your expertise to? When you sit on the floor of any center, it doesn't matter where you went to college, what course you graduated from, or even if you did go to college. When you sit down, you have one goal, one common objective - support the callers. Support them with what you've been trained with, and with how you're trained to do it. In my opinion it's all the same. If in my father's time call centers were in bloom, I'd bet my father would not have to leave the country, thrice. And probably my mother, the brave woman that she is, would've tried it as well.

What am I getting at? Simple. What happened to the "Filipino Pride"? Does it really bring "Pride" to call yourself the best workers around the world, where in our own soil, we're falling behind other Asian countries? Not only terms or infrastructure, but also in discipline. And now we're swimming in the fruits of the call center industry. Where all that hard work in college, the nights we put up studying & perfecting a thesis or a project, don't mean anything. I didn't realize all we had to now was, step in their front door, talk in English, & I'll get a job. A job where I'd earn better than my college classmates who followed their course. Who, up to this day, are still waiting for the big pay up. Or just the chance to get called out for an out-of-country project.

So who's carrying the pride now?