I guess it was bound to happen. Working from 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. the past couple days has been challenging enough since I've had to readjust my sleep schedule again. Yesterday, I came home, ate breakfast, then slept from around 10 to 12, watched Eastern Promises (good movie by the way), worked out, then slept again from 7 to 10, and headed into work. It would be nice to get some solid, unbroken sleep.

Anyway, by the end of my shift I was exhausted and looking forward to going home and getting some rest. The shuttle van my company provides was supposed to pick me up at 8:30, so I had to wait 30 minutes. Okay, I wasn't thrilled about that, but I waited anyway. By 8:45 I'd given up waiting since I was nodding to sleep on the sidewalk in front of work. I stood up, stepped out into the street and the rain, and hailed a taxi. The ride itself was smooth, and the driver didn't ostensibly try to rip me off. The problem came when we entered Rockwell. The smallest bill I had on me was 1000 pesos ($20 US), and the driver didn't have change.

"All right," I said. "You don't have change?" I looked over the seat at the meter. It read 80 pesos. "Okay. Eighty pesos," I said. "I'll be right back."

I ran into the 7-Eleven at my building and asked for change, but they didn't have it. I ran across the street to Figaro. Same problem. When I came back out into the rain, the driver had pulled up in front of the coffee shop. Apparently, he was afraid I was going to stiff him. I got back in.

"Drive up the block," I said. "There's a bank around the corner."

He drove me to the bank. I looked over the seat. The meter was still running. Scum.

We pulled up in front of the bank, and I ran up to the ATM. I didn't want to take money out because of international service fees, but I was wiped out and wanted to go home, so I did it. I took out 4oo pesos, expecting four 100 peso bills. Instead, the ATM spat out two 200 peso bills. Nice. To hell with it. I walked back down to the cab and opened the door. I held out the bill.

"Do you have change for this?" I snapped. Yes. It was a rhetorical question.

He pulled out a 100 peso bill. The meter read 90 now. He also held a twenty and smaller bills in his other hand. Nice. He was giving himself a tip. A whopping 40 cents.

"Choke on it," I barked.

I snatched the hundred out of his hand, tossed the 200 at him, and slammed the door. I'd actually planned on giving him a hundred anyway since he hadn't tried to screw me until it came time to pay, but now I was pissed. It was a two dollar cab ride with the tip, so the money was never the issue; the attitude was; the sense of entitlement, of getting over. Are you telling me no one in this damned city has change for twenty bucks?!?! I'm sure the stores didn't want to give it to me because I wasn't patronizing them at the time even though I'd been to both places several times before.

I'm still disgusted. I could take nine cab rides here for the price of one in New York, and that's not including the New York tip. I'm still floored at how these bastards are scrounging for pennies. It creates a lot of unnecessary aggravation for me and every other foreigner of whom they try to take advantage. I actually sympathize with their plight, but they're not dealing with it the right way. I guess they figure they'll never see the passenger again anyway, so get what you can from them while they're there. It's just sleazy.

Labels: ATM, cab, Eastern Promises, Figaro, international bank fees, Manila, New York, pesos, poverty, ripoff, Rockwell, sleep deprivation, taxi, work. 7-Eleven

So, I've been here over a week now, and my sleep is still off. I would say I'm dealing mostly with insomnia at this point. I start working my new permanent Manila shift tomorrow. I'll be working from 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. Monday through Friday. The anticipation of the new shift is probably at least partly responsible for my sleep issues. Tomorrow--or I should say Tuesday--will be a long day for me.

My coworkers who came down from New York with me went out the first night and partied. I don't know how they did it. I only managed to sleep a couple hours during the 20-hour flight here, so I crashed and burned once I checked into my room. They had a great time, and I wish I could have gone with them but I just couldn't make it. That's how it was for a good part of the first week. I allowed myself to sleep whenever I felt like it in an effort to catch up, though I've read you can never really catch up on sleep. I think I would disagree, though.

I felt rested enough the next day to head out with everyone to a club and meet up with the new analysts we would be training. We reserved a VIP room and drank beer, played pool, and sang karaoke. The new analysts, known to us as CSEs, are a good-natured, fun-loving group of people, and I think meeting them in such an informal setting for the first time was an excellent idea. I'm not a big fan of the stuffy corporate atmosphere, and I think it's good for us all to feel comfortable with each other since we'll be spending a lot of time together. I think the work experience will be just as rewarding as the travel experience.

I spent that weekend hanging out with my coworkers from the New York office, mostly shopping for essentials like food and clothes, dining out, and trying to get my sleep cycle in some kind of order.

Monday, we met at the Joya building in Rockwell Center around 2:30 p.m. to catch the shuttle van that takes us to work at Three World Square in downtown Makati City. Traffic wasn't bad at that time, and we made it in about twenty minutes. Work was light this week, mostly spent getting our laptops setup, our VPN access to New York, and ironing out a few issues before going live on the third.

There's a lot of construction going on by the Manila office but not a lot of options as far as eating out is concerned. There's McDonald's, Chinese, Japanese, a pancake house, a sandwich shop, Starbucks, a chicken joint, and a pizza place. I probably sound spoiled, and maybe I am, but it will be challenging for me to eat healthful meals at most of these places, especially since most of them will probably be closed during the hours I work. I'll have to see as the week progresses how things pan out. I'll certainly want to bring my own lunch if I can.

By the way, some observations about the food here: I still haven't tried Filipino food yet, and to be honest I'm in no rush to do so. After trying guinea pig in Peru, I think I've pretty much had it with being adventurous about what I put into my body. I know what I like and what I don't like, and I'm cool with that. I'm sure I'll try new things that intrigue me, but I won't go crazy. That being said, I've noticed that generally the portions are smaller here than in the US--no big surprise. That's no doubt a contributing factor to why most Americans are fat. Even the portions in McDonald's are smaller with the exception of the burgers and the Chicken McNuggets.

And speaking of chicken, apparently, unless you specify otherwise, all chicken served in restaurants here still has the skin on it. We even went to Teriyaki Boy the other night where I ordered a chicken teriyaki bento box, and though the menu clearly stated in no uncertain language that the chicken was skinless, it had skin on it.

There were a few other hitches in my week. Though I was able to get a temporary pass to the Rockwell Club which gives me access to the workout facilities, I still hadn't received my permanent ID by the time the temporary one expired Wednesday, so I had to head down to the club's office yesterday and get another temporary ID since the permanent one still wasn't ready. I lost Internet access sometime after midnight on Thursday, and called down to the front desk a couple times but still had no Internet at 9 a.m., so I headed down there in person to see what the story was. The guy at the front desk was clueless and put me on the phone with the cable company. After being transferred a couple times, I was informed there was an outage and that they were working on it. They suggested pulling the power and coax cables and jacking them back in. I had done that already, so all I could do was wait. I headed over to Figaro, a small coffee shop around the corner and had a small gourmet breakfast of honey glazed bacon and eggs over ciabatta bread and coffee--a nice little breakfast for 199 pesos or roughly $4.oo.

To further complicate things, my company had us attend a cultural awareness class Thursday from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. A great idea, but the timing sucked, and the class ran over twenty minutes. Afterward, we were hungry, so we ate at the McDonald's up the street, that being the only thing open at that time. Another night's sleep screwed up.

We did evaluations of the CSEs Friday, and I wish I could say things went smoother, but there were a few rough spots. I had to sit in the room with them and watch how they handled the calls. Basically, I had to watch to see if they opened all the correct databases, followed procedures, etc., while their team lead role played as the end user on the phone. I think I would attribute some of the problems to nervousness and others to spending way too much time documenting the calls when they should have been trying to resolve the issue at hand--an easy problem to correct. We'll see how things go tomorrow. The Manila office is supposed to get about twenty percent of the total call volume, so I don't think it will be too bad, and the CSEs will really learn the job best by doing it.

The evaluations done, there really wasn't anything else for us to do, so we left work early and ate at the aforementioned Teriyaki Boy. Aside from the skin on the chicken, the meal was good and uneventful.

After dinner, we walked around a little and explored the local shops of Market Market and Fort Bonifacio, then we decided to call it a night. We grabbed a taxi and headed back to Rockwell, and that's when the real adventure began. The driver took it upon himself to make a detour through a seedy neighborhood under the pretense of getting around the heavy traffic. At first, we thought he was doing right by us since the van had taken a similar detour earlier that day, but instead of circumventing the traffic and abbreviating our commute, it prolonged it by taking us straight into a blocked off street.

Randy knew the area better than the rest of us who'd just arrived, so he started giving the driver orders which the driver ignored. My thoughts at the time were that the driver was trying to jack up the fare or he was just incompetent or he was setting us up to be robbed by his buddies. Think about it: four Americans with new laptops in a bad neighborhood of an unfamiliar country--not good.

Eventually, we got back to the main thoroughfare and made it back safely to Rockwell, but Randy wasn't kidding about these cab drivers. My final opinion on the incident is that the driver knew exactly what he was doing. This is his country, and his job is driving people around the city. He wanted to jack up his price. The money means a lot less to us than it does to him. An extra 75 pesos ($1.50)? If he wasn't trying to screw us maybe he would have received a bigger tip. The only reason he received a tip at all was because it was easier for us to give him 100 peso bills than wait for change. I understand that 95 percent of the people in this country are poor, but it's really ashame that people like this driver haven't enough respect for us or themselves to do their jobs fairly and with a modicum of pride. I think it takes a lot of nerve to attempt to take advantage of someone like that.

Finally, yesterday, the four of us decided to take a trip to the Greenhills Shopping Center just east of San Juan. It's basically a huge flea market and haggling is not only commonplace but expected. A lot, if not most, of the merchandise on sale consists of knock-offs, bootlegs, black- and gray-market items. I picked up a couple Lacoste polo shirts for $12 US, but that was it. I personally didn't need and wasn't interested in anything else the merchants were selling. It took some getting used to hearing them constantly calling to us from their booths:

"Sir, do you need a wallet?"

"Sir, do you want a watch?"

"Sir, do you want a bag for your wife or girlfriend?"

It was that and the fact that everyone was staring at us, and why wouldn't they? Three black guys, one of which towered over everyone else at 6'5", and a white guy walking around an almost exclusively Asian marketplace. The attention hasn't been a negative thing, though, except maybe for some of the cab drivers looking to take advantage of us.

Tomorrow the call center goes live. Hopefully, it will go smoothly.

Labels: CSE, Figaro, Greenhills Shopping Center, Joya, Makati, McDonald's, San Juan, Teriyaki Boy