The night started out awesome, I went to the mall to meet up with an old friend and it was every bit as fun as I imagined it to be. We haven’t seen each other for years and now, I regret all the time I wasted not being able to catch up with her.
She and I were the newbies from our old HS and as I later found out, was a voracious reader, much like myself. So naturally, we got around comparing our favorite authors, borrowing each other's books and such. Back in the day, we belonged to a certain group of people in one class and almost hung around even during the weekends. By the time college was over, people sort of fell off the radar after high school, myself included.
Sitting in a restaurant while eating and laughing heartily amidst shared stories from days gone by was definitely a great way to start the year off! It has been a long time since I talked to someone I can relate to and be totally honest with. I spent most of last year bottling up anger and frustrations without telling anyone and for a while, Ii was really in a bad shape. The worst part was that I shut myself out from most people I hang out with because I was afraid of confronting them about the cause of my growing resentment. It might seem selfish of me to go on a monotonous tirade over dinner with a person I haven’t seen in more or less eight years but the words kind of just spilled out. The good news was she took it well and didn’t leave the room screaming, hahaha!
It’s good to know that even at this pathetic, hermit-like state I live in, there were still some days worth remembering. It was a nice night and I wish we could do it more often.
The events after that, however, were not that kosher.
As soon as I sat down to join an office mate for the training, I didn’t have much time to catch my breath. It amuses me now that earlier that evening, I confidently told my boss that if I am to master the activity that same night, I should be able to come back to the morning shift the night after because I figured, how hard can it be, right?
Well spank me hard and call me Bruno, the activity totally owned my washboard ass! By the time dawn was nearing, my head was just about ready to explode. I have been, at that time, awake for 22 hours already and yet I had to cram every confusing instruction in my drowsy, little mind, with an empty stomach to boot, at the dead of the night. I have to admit that much as I hate to mess up with my biological clock, eating habits, and generally my life but it was kind of great to learn new things and benefit from it. God knows I already forgot what it feels like to do a challenging task. I never touched Dreamweaver, Arles, and Chameleon like, ever because I never needed to until now. So there I was, taking notes, studying and figuring things out at ungodly hours and hating every minute of it.
There were moments where I seriously felt like I was about to burst to tears, not because I found myself totally not good at this new gig but because the new gig doesn’t seem to have much writing involved in it. That just depressed me like mad. Writing, for me, has been one of the sole things in life I find comfort with, no matter how boring the articles may be. Taken away from the familiar and being whiplashed to unchartered territory with not even a single, useful stored knowledge to help me get by was hard.
To get a grip and veer myself away from the negativity, I looked back at my HB days. Actually, there was only one day in particular day that always haunted me. On the last day of my first week working under HB Productions, my boss, who was bound to leave for Atlanta at that time, had to teach me everything about my job in one day. From introducing myself to the forums down to basic HTML, he sat me down and with that signature booming, condescending voice of his, spent the entire day freaking the fuck out of me and almost drove me to hysterics. That was probably one of the darkest days of my professional life.
Keep in mind that before that, I did nothing but post retarded spam messages all day long. So you can imagine how overwhelmed I was when I learned from this white guy that I am to handle two sites as the editor, has to scour five forums and answer questions and later, had to instigate contests, take care of the Sick Site Store, read lengthy write-ups and generally have to spend the rest of the year squeezing my brain out and stressing over everything. I made several blunders but thankfully, my boss was forgiving. Whenever I do something wrong, he always tells me something like "Don’t sweat the small stuff", "Shit happens “or my favorite, "Learn as you go along". I have to say that he may be a lot of things but he wasn’t a push over, at least not to me. So I learned a lot from that job and amazingly enough, I missed having to do something as demanding as that.
So whenever I’m faced with difficulty about anything that has something to do with my work, thinking about that fateful always makes everything seem easy-peasy. Hell, I could be piss drunk, crawling on the gutter with no clue on what my name is or where I live but I tell you, the thought of that day can probably sober me up faster than anything else.
Thankfully, I think I now have a pretty good idea on how this new project works and though I may not be as confident with my newly-learned skills, I say bring it on.
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