What to Do When You’re a Server for a Morning

What to Do When You’re a Server for a Morning

            A Social Science teacher would always say to us in Philippine History class, “expand your horizon of understanding!” The main character of a favourite movie said, “let us try to open our minds to a new idea.” Right. It’s so thrilling to be always right because you’re the customer, but what if you’re the one talking to and reasoning with the customer who’s always right? It’s much more thrilling, to tell you the truth.

            Your reasoning and speech power are not the only ones at stake here. Yes, you have to reason well, talk politely, and compromise, but you have to do it in such a way that your customers will not feel they’re being shortchanged. In short, reason well but not well enough that your customers think you’re on top. And keep that ridiculous smile on your face, even when you’re in a ridiculously tricky situation.

            And that’s exactly what it is, a situation. Imagine you’re a young server catering to the needs of an army of teachers training for the new curriculum. You have your serving tray with you which is stacked with sandwiches, and a fellow student server accompanying you who handles the juice drinks. Here’s what I did, and what I suggest you do if you’re ever in a situation like this. (If you do have better ideas, then don’t hesitate to put them to action!)

1.      When you have started serving the customers (albeit awkwardly since you haven’t been properly trained for the three-day job) and then one of the customers say, aren’t we included? (And they’re definitely not, because you’ve been categorically directed to cater to the teachers who have a meal stub that says LNU Cafeteria, and not the other catering service.) And this customer is just about as hungry as a hippo because now he’s bargaining with you (How much is the sandwich?) and practically making puppy dog eyes at you to make you agree. But he’s the wrong customer. What would you do? I just smiled, and moved on to the next table.

When one of the trainers do ask you this aren’t-we-included question, which I think is both an innocently phrased command (I’m the customer. Now come over and give me some of that food) and thinly veiled insult (Can’t you see I’m one of the participants? What are you doing trying to skip me?), smile (again) and give him/her his share (and the other trainers’ too). The manager will worry about it for you later. (Please do tell the manager about this incident, he/she might wonder why the food wasn’t enough to serve everyone, and where did it go.)

2.      When one of the customers, who is apparently not happy with the ‘disorganized’ way you have of serving, suggests a better idea (which by the way, you have already been practicing without her noticing it), smile, thank her for her thoughtful gesture, and reassure her that you’ll do it from now on.

3.      And of course, the classic customer question: may I have something else [insert name here] instead? Like when you’re handing out orange juice drinks and the customer wants pineapple juice. If you have what the customer wants, then give it, if you don’t, try to give a little sales talk and convince him/her that this drink is just as delicious, sweet, and healthy as the other one.

Or the other classic Filipino customer question: may I have more? Since the customers are at their charming best when putting out this question, I suggest you politely, but firmly, say No. (You’re going to be responsible if there’s one other customer who doesn’t get his share just because you gave in to this innocent demand.)

4.      And one more thing, when you realize that it’s a really small world and one of the teachers recognizes you as a former student, Why ever did you choose to shift? I thought you were learning to teach! What to do? I suggest you patiently explain and banter, I am learning to teach. This is part of the training.

            Michael Hammer was right, “Serving the customer is not a mechanical act but one that provides an opportunity for fulfillment and meaning.” Fulfilment because it gives you that I’m-a-good-human-being feeling that you’ve served somebody else other than yourself, that you’re actually not as selfish or as proud as you thought. I mean, teachers sure serve humanity unselfishly, and we all know that, but you’ve got to hand it over to the servers, the waiters and waitresses, the utility and the other people who serve you and wait on you, nang walang anumang pag-iimbot, pasubali, o hangaring umiwas, to use the Filipino terms. At least teachers have a semblance of authority inside and outside the classroom, but what about these guys who are inferior (in the Indian caste sense)? These are the people we don’t notice and often affront, just because they are visibly under us in a servant-master relationship. If Shirley Chisholm was right when she said that “Service is the rent that you pay for room on this earth”, then these guys have paid the rent twice or thrice over.

            If only for that feeling of fulfillment, I would do the serving job again. But it has its other perks too, for me. I get to wear slacks and high heels, a rather formal outfit for a serving job, if you ask me, but hey, one still has to look good, decent, and presentable even when you’re only serving. Plus, we get our share of snacks too. Pretty good pay for a two-hour job packaging the snacks and distributing them.

            You’re gonna have to serve somebody. Yes indeed, Bob Dylan. You just have to do it armed with a stack of polite arguments, a smile, and a sense of humor. (Oh, and one more thing I learned, no one likes the Dashing Dalandan flavor of Oh My Juice!, and I don’t know why. It tasted good when we were given it for a snack, because, yes, no one wanted it.)

The McCaughey Miracle

The McCaughey Miracle

            First of all, I would like to thank the Booksale management for coming up with a really ingenious plan of selling back issues of magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal at incredibly low prices. If they didn’t, my TLE 100 teacher wouldn’t be able to purchase a copy. Then she wouldn’t be giving it to us for reading and reacting. Then I wouldn’t be writing this (in which case, I’m really glad Booksale did it). Seriously.

            In a nutshell, the article talks about Bobbi and Kenny McCaughey who is a late-twenty-something married couple who have a three-year old daughter, Mikayla, at around the time Bobbi gave birth to not one, two, but seven healthy babies (in one delivery!) and how they cope with their lives.

Well that was easy. It was 1998. Happy families weren’t part of the limited edition must-haves back then. It was a normal thing. But then, 1998 isn’t any different from 2012. In fourteen years, children, family, and the shaky road to marital satisfaction haven’t changed. Maybe there were teeny, tiny changes with the times (getting a little bit more modern), but deep down, children, family and marital satisfaction are still the same: they’re a lot to take in.

            For example: children. Francis Bacon was right when he said, “Children sweeten labors, but they make misfortunes more bitter.” I’m sure we all love babies, especially when they’re making goo-goo eyes at us, or laughing so innocently, or dancing so determinedly cute but I’m quite sure any normal person in his right mind will be pretty much annoyed when it comes to cleaning up the soiled clothes, or waking up late at night to tend to the bawling baby. This is difficult, but think how more difficult it can be when they can already walk, talk, and play, when they already strut around the house acting so hardheaded. That’s when they’re kids.  It’s even more difficult (if that’s possible) when, a few years later, they’re rarely ever home, or when they’re home, they’re so unbelievably impossible, and just plain bored. That’s when they’re teenagers. More years later, you don’t even know where they are or what they might be doing or if you do know where they are and what they’re doing, it’s not a big part of your business anymore. That’s when they’re adults and they start to move away from home. But they’re still your children. And in the family, they are the center of everything. Yes, children sweeten labors. At least, Bobbi and Kenny wouldn’t be in need of hired help around the house; the children may be able to do it someday. But the problem is how to raise them so that they can help around the house.

            It’s like what Peter De Vries wrote, “There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.” Yes, children later on turn against you (I know; I did, sometimes), and if it’s already handful even if it’s just a child, how much more handfuls will it be if there are seven of them, all at once? Even Tanging Ina, Mrs. Ina Montecillo, with her famous twelve children whom she raised by herself (with the help of her husbands, when they were alive), admitted that, “Walang inang hindi napapagod.” She raised her children one at a time; but what would happen if seven came, all at the same time?

            Bobbi and Kenny have been very lucky and blessed so far. As of 1998, they have a new 5, 500-square foot and seven-bedroom house donated by building contractors and suppliers, plus six volunteers who help care for the babies. And Bobbi is efficiently organized when it comes to the babies, in fact, she now knows more about the seven-baby stuff to be able to cut down volunteer work from six days to three days only, so she can spend more time with her babies. Clearly, Muriel Spark was right, “Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.” They learn to change the diapers and wash the soiled baby clothes, feed and play with the baby, work for a cause (that’s a baby- and family-cause) and best of all, they learn that life is not really all about oneself: because when the babies come, they’re all you have time to think about. And that’s a very tall order for a couple who is only in their late twenties (for every couple in fact, young or old). How do they even manage to stay as a couple?

            I think that’s when the marriage stuff comes in. A Reader’s Digest quote says, “A wedding is an event, but marriage is an achievement.” And although my favourite writer Jane Austen wrote that, “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance”, I still agree with Herbert Samuel that, “It takes two to make a marriage a success and only one a failure.” It’s not all about love every time, there’s got to be effort between both parties: an effort to reach out, to adjust, to share, to get things straightened out, to fight if needed. After all, I suppose what makes married life so like married life are the fights; you’re not really married if you don’t have those wars of the sexes, or principles. I mean these fights are not childish skirmishes where you’re just spoiling for trouble; these fights often happen because both parties are trying to reach a compromise, but they haven’t agreed yet. This is normal. You just have to see beyond these fights and not let them be the end of the marriage. Or babies, for that matter (some couples stay so wrapped up with the babies that they forget they were a couple in the first place). After all, marriage really is a word…it’s not a sentence! If you really love that person enough to marry him/her, then exert effort enough to stay married!

            This includes quality time with each other, managing the finances of course, and many other things. With Bobbi and Kenny, they schedule the babies’ nap and sleep hours with the Kenny’s arrival from work, so that Kenny can help put the babies to sleep and the couple can have a few hours alone afterwards, catching up. Of course the finances are considerably increased now, but they are managing their income pretty well, also writing a book on their sudden fame. The trick is to do things slowly, so that you can afford the changes.

            This is certainly hard work but then as Bobbi would advise to other couples who want large families (or even small ones), “I’d tell them not to expect to have time for the things they enjoy for a while. I’d tell them to set their priorities. The babies need them, whether or not their floor is scrubbed and the house cleaned. And I’d tell them that the fun stuff outweighs the bad.” The fun stuff does outweigh the bad; if married people didn’t think so, there wouldn’t be babies and families anymore, would there?

            Still, with God, and a little help from friends, a loving couple can stick it out together, with and eventually without the babies!

How is English in the Philippines?

How is English in the Philippines?

            Much has been said about the English proficiency of Filipinos. The mass education strategy of the Americans certainly left us with a considerable advantage in the English-speaking workplace. However, in recent years, stiff competition from other countries is undermining this advantage, and with the declining mastery of the English language by our college graduates, Filipino proficiency in English is said to be in a deplorable state.

            A survey conducted by the Social Weather Stations in 2007 shows the stark reality: out of 1, 200 respondents, only 32% could speak English, as opposed to 54% in 2000 and 56% in 1993; 65% of the respondents understood spoken English, 12% lower than the previous surveys; 65% could read English, compared to 76% in 2000 and 73% in 1993; and 48% could write in English, a decrease from 61% and 59% of the last two surveys, respectively.         

            2008 language test results released by the IDP Education Pty. Ltd. Philippines, an accredited group that administers the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) to Filipinos seeking to work and migrate abroad, also showed that the Philippines is no longer the top English-speaking country in Asia. Malaysia beat the Philippines with an overall score of 6.71, making them the most proficient Asian country in English. The Philippines placed only second with 6.69, followed by Indonesia, India and Thailand.

Still, a 2009 report submitted by the Universal Access to Competitiveness and Trade (UACT), the research consultative committee of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI) showed that for every 100 applicants, only six to ten percent of the college-graduate applicants are effectively recruited and deployed for an entry level job.

And it looks like we wouldn’t be left in peace with all these findings. Filipino proficiency in English has been censured more recently as an Inquirer News on April 15 reported that Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Abrams of Hagatna, Guam criticized Filipino English as “not good enough”. This controversial comment was reportedly made during the Guam Board of Allied Health’s meeting, where members discussed a proposal to outsource a transcription task to a transcriber in the Philippines.

Abrams objected to the transcription outsourcing, saying, "I don't like the idea at all. Their English is not good enough. You're dealing with a third world country where English is a second language and we're dealing with tapes that are not crystal clear…We're dealing with a transcriber who may or may not know anything about legal proceedings and certainly can't pick up the phone... to get clarification as to what they might have said." Naturally, the Philippine Consulate General in Guam was incensed by these ‘racially-discriminating remarks’ as to prepare to file an ethics complaint against Abrams.

Yet, as though to counter these racially-discriminating remarks, less than two weeks later, on April 25, the Philippines was dubbed the world’s best country in business English, according to a Yahoo! Southeast Asia News update.

For 2012, results showed that from 76 represented countries worldwide, only the Philippines attained a score above 7.0, ‘a BEI level within range of a high proficiency that indicates an ability to take an active role in business discussions and perform relatively complex tasks’, according to the results of the annual Business English Index (BEI), the only index that measures business English proficiency in the workplace, conducted by the GlobalEnglish Corporation.

While the rest of the world ranked beginner and basic level, the Philippines was the lone country in the intermediate level, beating struggling economic powers such as Japan, Italy and Mexico and fast-growth emerging markets such as Brazil, Columbia and Chile with a score of 7.11, followed by Norway, Estonia, Serbia, and Slovenia in the top five and Malaysia (the most proficient Asian country in English based on 2008 IELTS results) in a distant seventh place. Even the United States gained a relatively low score of 5.09, a phenomenon attributed to a majority of test takers being foreign-born engineers and scientists, the study indicated.

 GlobalEnglish noted that a country’s business English capability is an indicator of its economic growth and business success. “This is particularly interesting because the Philippines, a country with one-tenth of the population of India, recently overtook India as a hub for call centers. Over 400,000 Filipinos are now employed in call centers, roughly 50,000 more than in India… It is not surprising that both the Philippines and Norway—the only two countries in the top five in both 2011 and 2012—are improving their economies, based on the latest GDP data from the World Bank,” according to the study.

  One would think that the Philippines is rightfully avenged against such mocking comments as Abrams’. Maybe, maybe not. Behind the bravado against his dishonourable comment, perhaps there really is some truth in Abrams remark after all. The BEI findings still do not eliminate the fact that there really are employees who do not speak acceptable English in the workplace. But then again, as the BEI findings show, these employees are considerably few in relation to the majority who can speak intermediate level business English, the best in the whole world. And even if only six to ten percent of every 100 college-graduate applicants are effectively recruited and deployed for an entry level job according to a UACT 2009 report, these six to ten percent are highly proficient, and significantly so.