Week One: My Classmates Are Spokening Dollars

We were 25 in our batch, composed mostly of girls. As far as I can tell, I was the only gay guy in our batch; we had an openly gay lesbian whom the guards always thought was a guy and kept stopping her from entering the ladies bathroom. There were young moms, fresh graduates, and a couple of transferees from other call centers. Only one other batchmate was older than me; he was 53, and was previously assigned to a different account. Everyone else was younger than me. Interestingly, most of use were working for the first time at a call center.

I was kinda disappointed that out of the 9 guys besides me in class, I only found one who was kinda cute, in a little boy way. He was quite young, short in stature, and with a high pitched voice that American callers would later on mistake for a woman. On our first day, he kept looking my way. I wondered if he was checking me out, or he was just curious as to why someone my age would be in a call center. As the lessons progressed and we bonded as a group, the girls decided to make Ruzzel (yes, he spells his name with two Z's) our class bunso.

Meanwhile the girls started calling me "Daddy Joel", which I didn't mind. The boys called me "po" at first, but I quickly dissuaded them from that. After a while of being called daddy, I decided in one class recitation to mention matter-of-factly that I was gay. Afterwards while most of the girls still called me daddy, the cheekier ones called me "mamshie".

Our first week of training was spent reviewing our English lessons. Our instructor kept emphasizing that it was a review; we were hired because we had a better command of the English language than most. But hearing some of my batchmates speak in English, I wondered how low that bar was. Or maybe the bar wasn't low; I was just operating at a higher plane.

Now, before you shoot me for being all-haughty and prideful, let me explain. My first week at training showed me how much of an advantage my Arneow training gave me in terms of speaking in English. I didn't even bother to review my tenses; I never even got tense at all in any of the tests. I coasted on stock knowledge and ended up at the top of the class by the end of the week. Top 2 got a 92%. I got 98% without breaking a sweat.

And I have the Jesuits to thank for that. You see, the moment I stepped into Prep, I was surrounded by priests, teachers, and classmates speaking in English. The masses and homilies were in impeccable English. They were talking about TV shows and movies that were in English, so I started watching those shows and movies (it helped that my mom also favored the American TV series; the only local shows she'd watch were Tang Tarangtang and John En Marsha). My classmates read Hardy Boys, so I started reading them too. I learned American idioms because I heard them used and figured out their meaning through context. Our grade 5 teacher even taught us the word "preposterous". At grade 5!

So yes, I was feeling high on my first week. But I knew things would change on the second and third week, when we start studying the product. I may have an advantage over these millennials with the English language, but they're more computer-literate and computer-savvy than me. And their youthful minds can still be stuffed with a lot of new knowledge. I fear my mental processor may not have enough space for a gigaton of new data.

Let's see.