Wednesday, June 25, 2003
Here's the thing.
I moved to the UK after about three years of doing assignments for my company across Asia. I'm what is commonly known as a systems analyst, which on the IT food chain is slightly above common household bacteria but below systems MANAGERs. My love of travel was exploited by said company and it lured me with trips and assignments abroad.
It's not easy to travel where I come from. Thailand used to conjure up images of unspoilt beaches, beautiful women and delicious food. It still does; I'm not from Thailand.
No, I'm from the Philippines, which used to have the same pristine international reputation, but now now conjures up visions of kidnappers with T-shirts wrapped around their heads shooting machine guns into the air. Terrorist capital of Southeast Asia. It doesn't help that the per capita monthly income is somewhere around the price of a coffee and sandwich in London.
But, the traveling. Multinationals flock to our hot and humid corner of the world for the cheap, English-speaking labor. In return systems analysts like me get to jet around in economy class and drink beer at cheap hotels, and (occasionally) do systems work for the company. This was how I was able to backpack through China, climb an active volcano in Indonesia and visit shogun's castles in Osaka.
I tell you this only because I want you to understand my feelings. I'm eternally grateful to this huge unfeeling corporate behemoth for giving me the chance to experience the world. I'm also quite pissed off at having to work 9-to-9 hours as a matter of course, having to be bypassed for promotion time and again because, in my group's twisted value system, a foreign assignment is a "reward in itself"; and seeing all the tax exemptions that would have brought revenue to my country instead go into the an R&D department in search of silkier toilet paper.
In the end, a strange series of events forced me into a choice I didn't think I'd have to make for another two years. And in the end, here I am.
- shoe
I moved to the UK after about three years of doing assignments for my company across Asia. I'm what is commonly known as a systems analyst, which on the IT food chain is slightly above common household bacteria but below systems MANAGERs. My love of travel was exploited by said company and it lured me with trips and assignments abroad.
It's not easy to travel where I come from. Thailand used to conjure up images of unspoilt beaches, beautiful women and delicious food. It still does; I'm not from Thailand.
No, I'm from the Philippines, which used to have the same pristine international reputation, but now now conjures up visions of kidnappers with T-shirts wrapped around their heads shooting machine guns into the air. Terrorist capital of Southeast Asia. It doesn't help that the per capita monthly income is somewhere around the price of a coffee and sandwich in London.
But, the traveling. Multinationals flock to our hot and humid corner of the world for the cheap, English-speaking labor. In return systems analysts like me get to jet around in economy class and drink beer at cheap hotels, and (occasionally) do systems work for the company. This was how I was able to backpack through China, climb an active volcano in Indonesia and visit shogun's castles in Osaka.
I tell you this only because I want you to understand my feelings. I'm eternally grateful to this huge unfeeling corporate behemoth for giving me the chance to experience the world. I'm also quite pissed off at having to work 9-to-9 hours as a matter of course, having to be bypassed for promotion time and again because, in my group's twisted value system, a foreign assignment is a "reward in itself"; and seeing all the tax exemptions that would have brought revenue to my country instead go into the an R&D department in search of silkier toilet paper.
In the end, a strange series of events forced me into a choice I didn't think I'd have to make for another two years. And in the end, here I am.
- shoe
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