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Jay’s Literature Page
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| Last updated: 03 Oct 2005 |
(2001-2003)
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Wina Weena and Sonjä Soñez
It was 3:20 PM, five minutes past the last break, and two hours and ten minutes till the end of the working day. Wina Weena was the current Supplies Acquisition Officer of a Mongolian-based furniture assembly factory in Bulacan. An intelligent woman, women's rights advocate, fun-loving, yet highly responsible and professional, Wina Weena had been able to handle the responsibilities demanded by her position remarkably well for all the four and a half years since taking the post. Right now, she was two seconds into picking up a phone ringing in her very own office desk. She was just in the process of secretly sending a personal email correspondence using the company's resources in applying for a job of the same description in a, presumably, rival company. As soon as her email application informed her that sending was done, she cleared up the evidence by deleting the entire Sent Items folder, and picked up the phone. Owing to the phone's Caller ID feature, she was able to determine at a glance that the caller, in fact, was using a phone local in their building. Provided with this information, Wina Weena was able to deduce with some level of accuracy that the caller was an officemate named Sonjä Soñez. She was right, too. "Wina, hi," said a woman's voice on the other end of the line. It was the kind of voice that never failed to give anyone the impression that they were talking to someone who had been previously a Customer Care Officer--basically because she had been one. Sonjä Soñez's employment record consisted of eight solid years of working for four different Westerner-owned Call Centers in the Money District. She was either in her late twenties or early thirties. Her real age was a matter of strict secrecy between her, her few friends and close family members, and the Human Resoures Officers of all the employers she had ever worked for. Her refusal to divulge her age was offset only by how she freely gave away information about her salary. Sonjä Soñez was one of the bulk of professionals employed in the country who earned only slightly above the minimum wage. She belonged to the income group of those whose regular earnings could only afford a modest dwelling on a rented flat, a fast food diet, a movie every two weeks, and perhaps at least one dinner in an expensive restaurant if she really saved up for it for an entire month. Having mouths to feed, like children, and members of an extended family, would absolutely ruin her finances, and not to mention cause those dependent on her money to starve. Fortunately, children she had none, and dependent family had all migrated as illegal aliens to a foreign country before she could even receive her first paycheck on her first job, so people leeching on her meager earnings for survival was not a problem. If she had anyone leeching on her and her meager earnings at all, it was a fully-grown, able-bodied, unemployed, free-loader of a husband she had in the person of Kidd Janglo. Kidd Janglo had been the constant cause of Sonjä Soñez's most recent problems. Complaints about him had been the most usual subject of conversation between her and her friends of late, as much for his current free-loading status, as for his unsanitary habit of not lifting the toilet seat when he urinated. Wina Weena braced herself for another such conversation, but was slightly surprised to hear that Sonjä Soñez's voice sounded considerably brighter than her whining usual. "Ei, Sonjä", Wina answered back, though not quite achieving a Customer Care Officer quality of voice. "Remember those chairs," Sonjä said, "Mrs. Hoiyez... you know... had accidentally set fire to two days ago?" "Yeah, I remember. What about those?" "Well, it turns out it's been proven by some furniture repair expert that they are beyond repair. They advised it'd be best if we got ourselves new ones." "Oh." |
| © 2005 Jay Santos |