by Eo Villegas
I went to Ministop shell for my Junior Engagement Program. I’m not going to sugarcoat it, I expected the worst. Dirty kitchens, irritable employees, rude customers, and a lot of dirty work. I expected to walk in and out without socializing with anyone, not even my fellow Atenean who would also be doing the Junior Engagement Program. I enter Ministop and see my fellow Atenean, Mark. He tells me to go to the back room to look for Sir Adam. He then calls Mark and I and begins to brief us about Ministop and what we’ll be doing for the next few days. My expectations then changed seeing a nice man in Sir Adam. But of course, I returned to totality as soon as I left Ministop on my first session. Eventually as time passed and we got to know Sir Adam and Sir Jek more, we realized they were also regular people, with regular lives. All my preconceived notions vanished. We started talking about UFC, various video games that we commonly played and our families. As we began to see their face in all its nudity, we learn about their lives and wish we could do something about it. Sir Adam was telling me about how he goes overtime without pay. He was telling me during the habagat last August, he had to stay in Ministop for 3 days straight. He had to sleep in the back room office, endured all that for very little, if any, overtime pay. They called it TY lang, meaning “thank you lang.” Rude customers come in and out and treat them like lesser-people. It pulled me out of my totality and made me realize that sometimes, I am that rude customer who treats them as people lower than my stature, I am the person who expects the Ministop crew to carry the ice I buy to my car, to get the chillz that I purchase and the like. After that Ministop experience, I am now disturbed and will continue to be. It’s disturbing to see how hard working people like Sir Adam are and how they don’t get paid right. How respectful and nice they are and they don’t get treated right by customers.
I’m glad to see how life is on the other side. It has opened my eyes more to the real world and how I can be of service to them in the future.
I also had a similar experience in my JEEP engagement as a UP Manininda. In the past, I usually thought of maninindas as dishonest persons, who will try to cheat their customers by increasing their product's price so as to increase their profit. However, when I began to work with them, I saw how honest they are. There was a time when one of the maninindas shared to me that many people usually leave stuffs behind. These stuffs include wallet, checks and even laptops. They would always return these things back to their owners and she even showed me a cellphone which they were unable to return but they are still keeping just in case the owner of it goes back and looks for it. I was really moved by this experience. It made me realize that the Other indeed cannot be grasped in our own terms.
ReplyDelete-Russell Virata
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