That Girl Was Me!

The people in my new condo hate me. No, these are not the residents… since there are only 4 or 5 of us in the entire building…and I haven’t met any one of them. These are the people working on the building.

The carpenters think I’m a bitch because I always give them the irritated look when they get on the elevator with me(not because I’m being a Gretchen Baretto, but because they’re always so sloooow!). The engineer hates me because I yelled at him over the phone for not doing something about the electricity after Milenyo. The building admin thinks I’m a spoiled brat because I keep giving demands (clean my bathroom! fix my lights! install my curtain rods!). The maintenance women hate me because I sweep all the dirt from my unit out to the corridor every night (because I don’t have a dust pan!) and leave my trash bags outside my door (not because I’m tamad but because it’s always dark at the garbage chute area). Even the intercom guy hates me because I screamed at him for disturbing my sleep.

So I’m very grateful that every morning, there is this one guy with a bigote who runs to help me with my bags and hails cabs for me. As in, every morning, when I step out the building, he would run to me, carry my bags, go to the middle of the street, conduct traffic, and hail me a cab.

Since I bought some extra Uraro cookies from my recent business trip to Quezon and Marinduque, I decided to give him one pack as a token of my appreciation. On the day that the building admin handed him the Uraro, I received this text message from the man with bigote:

Gd PM Mam. Mrming Mrming slamat po sa bgay nnyo po skin. Mam sna po  pgpalain kyo ng buong Maykapal. Mam I mis u. Ingat po kyo plagi. I lv u.

Huwaaaattttt!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Creepy!!!

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When I first started blogging, I specifically chose Friendster blogs so that only my chosen friends can see my entries.

A few months later, Marc gave me my new site (www.thatgirlwasme.com).

A month later, a boss googled me and found my site. She told another boss…who then googled me and found my site as well.

And just a while ago…I was in a meeting with my boss, the boss of my boss, the boss of the boss of my boss, and the company CEO. I was just sitting there, quietly laughing to myself because the Singaporean consultant kept pronouncing ‘access’ as ASSESS (“we will provide internet assess…”), when another consultant brought up blogging.

Alas, my blogsite was brought up and revealed to the big bosses! What’s more, the Singaporean said potential employers read the blogs of their applicants as well!

So, if you are a boss or a potential employer….

1. I would like to clear that this blog does not reflect, in any way, my professional performance. I am very serious about my work. In fact,the reason I’m blogging is to get consumer insight. I am trying to get into what our target consumers are doing. Well…actually…I started blogging because I was always dateless and had no one to talk to on weekends. And because they said if I blogged well enough, I could turn pro and earn enough to resign and never work again……

2.  I would also like to clear that this does not reflect my total personality. I know that my entries are a bit risque…okay, some are outright vulgar…but this is not the suma total of my personality. I’m really a very nice, conservative young lady.

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Manang Linda, my ever reliable cleaning lady, is becoming less and less reliable. She almost broke my flush, for the second time. She squeezes my bras too much when she washes them, making them deformed. She broke my kitchen cabinet. She keeps eating my cupcakes. She keeps throwing away things I need and keeps keeping things I don’t need (she threw away a Meralco electric bill but kept a bus ticket she found on the floor)!

And yet, our arrangement is so convenient that I can’t afford to ditch Manang Linda.

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I used to have a poster of Batista on my ref door when I was still in my old condo. I had noticed then that everytime I came home after Manang cleaned the house, a fridge magnet would be covering Batista’s face. I thought then that maybe Manang didn’t like how Batista looks.

When I moved in to my new place, the movers threw away my Batista poster, so I just placed a baby picture of mine on the ref. When I got home one night after Manang cleaned up, I found MY face covered with a fridge magnet as well!!

So I set up an experiment…and here is what I found…

Before I left the house, my ref door looked like this:

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I have been recently listening to a lot of call center recordings posted on blogs or sent through emails. Aside from the PLDT “PI” agent, the one that really made me laugh was the girl on the Dumb Pinoy Call Center recording.

Yes, we make fun of these…but don’t a bigger majority of our population actually speak this way? In fact, they should just create a separate dialect or language category altogether for call-center speak…something like “Pinglish”…Pinoy English.

And believe me…Americans can understand Pinoy English very well. Heck, they probably deal with Filipinos practically everyday in the States!

When my dad decided to go to the States, the first question on my mind was, HOW THE HELL IS HE GOING TO SURVIVE THERE?? This is someone who once told me he was going to take me to POK ARTS CHATTER (Folk Arts Theater) and who told me that I was “Kulang sa POKUS” (focus).

And yet, he is now a MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER for this multi-level marketing company he works for. Whenever he brags to me, “Natulala yung mga Amerikano nung narinig mga sinabi ko. Natahimik sila!”…I would wonder if natahimik sila because they were impressed or because they didn’t understand a thing he said??

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