I used to hate Ortigas before, but now I’m finding it the funniest, most ridiculously absurd place in the world.  When it comes to ridiculous absurdities, you can count me in as a fan.  Most people tend to add some semblance of glamor or prestige into their otherwise mundane and pointless roles as cogs in the wheel of a system they have nothing to do with, but got sucked (or suckered) into.

There are at least two ways that I know of to accomplish this much-needed (pardon the term) psychological blowjob:

• Understatement: Call yourself a “worker” even if you wear a collared shirt to work, and you don’t belong to a union.  For us in the content writing industry, it’s to call yourself a “corporate slave.”  Understatement has a lot to do with some degenerative personality disease.
• Overstatement: Make your job seem glamorous or interesting.  For call center agents, it’s calling yourself a “sales representative,” “customer service representative,” or “technical support representative.”  It’s to put yourself on the same plane as a politician.

I believe that no other method can bring the ego to a mind-blowing multiple orgasm than calling the place you work something else than it’s supposed to be.  Now that I started the sex metaphors, it’s like having sex, and by the time you’re about to… become one with Atman, so to speak, you groan (men) or moan (women) someone else’s name.  There’s “Eastwood City:” for all intents and purposes, it’s a complex of buildings crowded in some tract of land at Libis, not a “city” per se.  Or Makati, pronounced as “Mah-ka-ry.”  And of course there’s my Borg Cube: call Ortigas “Ehr-tee-gess.”

I’ve been in “Ehr-tee-gess” for a long time to profess that a lot about it revolves around completely necessary pretentions.  No matter how expensive your cellphone is, no matter how nice your clothes are, and no matter how many coffees at Starbucks you drink, you’re bound to eat at Hong Kong Style Noodle, and get the buy-one-take-one deals at Angel’s Burger.  I can sometimes do the Vulcan mind-meld with some of the pa-kikay types right behind Saint Francis who, on a good day, would don those big-ass shades, pretend to be Anne Curtis, and discreetly feed themselves with what we aura-interrupting plebians feed ourselves anyway.

Those big-ass shades also come in handy when:

• You don’t want to be seen riding the MRT (you either don’t have a car, or your parents decided to sell or dock your Toyota Vios until such time that gas prices roll back down to P30)
• You don’t want to be seen passing through SM Megamall B (because you’ll be passing through a supermarket, and you’d rather pass by EDSA Shangri-La)
• You don’t want to be seen smoking Winston Lights (because you don’t know that you can get the more sosy cigarettes at a cheaper price but you only know 7-Eleven and Mini Stop)
• You don’t want to be seen carrying a brown envelope to apply at some random BPO (because you’d rather be seen working at more cushy office jobs at “Mah-ka-ry”)
• You don’t want to be seen working from any other place outside San Miguel Corporation (none of us are good enough for them anyway)
• You don’t want to be seen walking or crammed into an FX (refer to first bullet point)
• You don’t want to be seen, period.

I know it’s not funny.  So?

I guess I have the habit of depressing myself from things that have absolutely nothing to do with me.  This is just another one of them.

There’s a difference between a “career” and a “job.”  “Careers” are for the educated sort; they are for people who think they are entitled to a place in the corporate world, no matter how small or irrelevant it is.  “Jobs” are of the menial sort; they are for people who offer hard work in exchange for a shot at survival.  Career-seekers venture off to the Internet shop and prostitute themselves through verbose resumés in JobStreet.  Job seekers knock on the door, ring on the bell, tap on the window to get their place in the world.

“Pakikipagsapalaran” is a cliché in the Filipino language: the irony of it is that yes, it is dehumanizing.  It is often translated as “taking a risk,” but I think the irony is captured by the fact that most pakikipagsapalaran takes place when you give up your free will and judgment, throw everything out the window, and leave everything to the Fates that come your way.

I was hanging around Ayala Station last night to meet up with my brother, when a man tugged me at the sleeve and asked, “Ser, san po pwedeng mag-apply dito?  Encoder po sana, kung pwede lang po.”  I’ve been working for The Man long enough to know that you don’t look for jobs at six in the evening.  I can sense the desperation - and the determination - in the man.  He’s not the kind of snooty hotshot walking around Makati’s malls, pretending to be employed.  I sense that he was one of those promising graduates of his province’s community vocational college, finished the secretarial course at the expense of the family carabao, risked it all like Dick Whittington, and realized that Ayala Avenue is paved with asphalt and chumps who walked in, and were immediately shown the door.

I had to say sorry that I can’t help the man, but then again, my eyes darted to the file of people making their way to the train station.  I realized that Ayala is such a busy place not because of people looking to buy something at Glorietta, but because of people carrying brown envelopes to somewhere.  It is a place where hope is cruel, where there’s no such thing as a place for anyone looking for a chance to prove one’s self.  Every business district in Manila - Eastwood City, Bonifacio Global City, Ortigas Center, Makati - revolves around the “what is” and the “what isn’t.”  “What is” is to be employed here, to be a cog in the wheel, to be an unwitting beneficiary and victim of a capitalist order that will swallow you whole, no matter how much you profess to your ideals.  “What isn’t” is to be not employed here, to be rejected, to be like that man who is a nothing more and nothing short of a victim.

Unfair?  In all senses of the word, yes.  This man should not have been roaming the streets of Ayala had there been a fair chance for him to earn his keep to be at least part of what is a hallmark of “success” in this place: to work in a glass-paned skyscraper where you don’t know - or could care less for - what suffering and pretentiousness lies on what floor.  This man should not have been tugging at sleeves asking for work had there been a fair chance for him to improve without even thinking of evil corporate empires, where development all over the country is a level playing field, that if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.  This man should have not clung his hopes to a faded brown envelope had there been something better out there.

Goddammit, but nothing in life is fair.  I guess I’m depressed because whether I like it or not, as a cog in the wheel of this abyss of office buildings and cubicles, this has everything to do with me.

A friend of mine sent me an e-mail about a certain Friendster blogger named “ihatecofi,” who has some rather caustic comments about “Orcs.” Thanks to a Google-search, I found that the blogger maintains a separate blog at “Make Poverty History,” where he has even more caustic comments about “Orcs.”

Instead of pissing me off, the blogger made me think a bit deeper than usual.

Some weeks back, I wrote about the political life of what I call the “call center generation (CCG).” The hallmark of our generation is business placement outsourcing, whether it’s in a windowless office or a home-based job that requires an Internet connection (I belong to the “windowless office” category). While I do appreciate The Warrior Lawyer’s thoughtful perspective that the CCG is the “first truly globally-oriented generation of Filipinos,” I still see things in terms of a less-than-optimistic light. The challenge to the CCG is the motto of Friends of the Earth: “Think globally, act locally.”

Anyway, the BPO is like being caught between a rock and a hard place:

• Factor 1: Outsourcing represents an aggressive, unsustainable economic policy that drains human resources and many forms of capital;
• Factor 2: Outsourcing represents a convenient and (hopefully) temporary means of employment to address basic human needs and other canons of taste.

I’m not an economist, but from what I do know (please correct me if I’m wrong), institutional economics - represented by thinkers like Thorstein Veblen and John Kenneth Galbraith - eschews the rigors of mathematics in favor of a socio-cultural approach to economic perspectives. Perfect, since I think that an economist will explain Factor 2 in terms of line graphs and funky equations.

Veblen, in particular, is known for the concept of “conspicuous consumption.” In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen observes:

Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his own unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in evidence by this method. The aid of friends and competitors is therefore brought in by resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and entertainments. Presents and feasts had probably another origin than that of naïve ostentation, but they acquired their utility for this purpose very early, and they have retained that character to the present; so that their utility in this respect has now long been the substantial ground on which these usages rest.

“Veblen goods,” or in a word: Starbucks.

I won’t be sanctimonious as to say that I do not enjoy the occasional frappé, the less-than-occasional pack of Dunhill Filters, or the definitely-not-occasional trips to malls. To keep up with the Joneses is something consistent with - or even corollary to - capitalist society, which is manifested in this case by outsourcing. Alcohol and coffee become necessary as social needs to survive in stressful work environments, even if in some cases, indulgence in luxury goods and activities come at the expense of basic necessities like food and transportation.

The horror of it is that after hours of inbound tech support and outbound telemarketing, it takes a cup of coffee and the atrocity called San Mig Light to make you feel human (before you send me hate-mail, I’m a Pale Pilsen guy). It is reminiscent of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, although with a more corporate twist, sans the horrors of slaughterhouses in the 1900s…

But that’s another story.

I don’t care what you do for a living, how much you make, or what salutatory title precedes or follows your name.  If you got to take a dump, you have to take a dump.

Almost everyone new to the workforce will be hesitant to do Number Twos at the office comfort room.  My first month was rife with having to hold my intestinal sausages in until such time that I can go home, lock the bathroom door, and take to the literal cleansing of the bowels.  Of course, you can’t hold on to such behavior for too long.  I don’t know if company health plans ensure for ruptured colons.

I guess taking nonchalant craps are something exclusive to menfolk.  Men more than women are more open about bodily catharsis.  After all, any tree, wall, or utility post is a potential urinal.  We don’t make much of a deal about taking a shat as women do.  Women beat men hands-down at farting inside elevators; they retain their poise.  Poise is not exactly something you retain when you have your underwear bunched down to your knees, and you’re popping out cholera-infected Smurfs from down there.

Yet professionalism and good conduct extends to every company property; yes, even in the comfort room, even at the most private moment of making jebs, you have to conduct yourself properly.  You have to act like you have a wedgie, and you feel like taking a long dump.  You have to stifle every urge to grunt and to groan.  Vocalization helps a lot in ridding yourself out of yesterday’s dinner of munggo, and you really can’t do this in the office bathroom unless you want rumors to spread over your grunting and groaning at the bathroom cubicles.

And then there’s toilet paper.  At the precise moment when you need to say goodbye to those playful little denizens of Oz that have walked down the Brownish-Yellow Brick Road, you realize that there’s no more toilet paper.  Offices may be quick on salaries, but I have yet to see an office that’s quick on restocking bathrooms with loo rolls.  For those who have forgotten to buy them pop-up packs at the MiniStop or 7-Eleven, there’s always the water pail.

Discretion, as a reminder, is the better part of valor.

I stop at Shaw Boulevard Station at around 6:45 AM.  As I run along that sidewalk that is the theoretical administrative border between Mandaluyong and Pasig, I start to get really pissed off…

Who in the blue hell designed Ortigas Center?

I finally figured out why an “enterprising” taxi driver (driving a “Eulincoln” Nissan Sentra taxi, plate number TVU 227… e-mail me for the cellphone number) was able to legitimately hoodwink me out of P100 for a cab ride on a rainy Friday afternoon last week (from SM Megamall to my office at Tycoon Center).  One-way routes all over the place are designed for pissant taxi drivers to milk the wages out of poor writers like myself who do not know how to count change.

In my anger, I still have a draft of a strongly-worded letter to the local transport bureau to arrest and discipline this moron who offered me the services of a quack doctor for the sum of P500, and even took a nudge at the possibility of my fare justifying a replacement for his cheap-ass radio “made in China.”

I guess this is my own hazing to the many manloloko’s and pa-simple’s of all 17 cities and municipalities of Metro Manila.  I am sure that this nation’s capital is not short on thieves and hoodlums who plunder the pockets of the common man to get ahead in life.  I don’t need to swim along and across a certain polluted river to get close to some shining examples of the decay of Filipino society.

I’m sending that letter tomorrow.  Next up: another draft of a letter to be sent to the MetroStar Express to curb shoving in the MRT.