I'll be calling these entries my "Technicolor Musings" for now as inspired by my partner's suggestion to work the rainbow concept into the title in a geekier way. Should this actually become a full independent blog, I can think about the permanent title around by then.
So without further ado, the first ever Technicolor Musings post.
My "day" job is being one of the Marketing Managers for a multi-national call center. We have offices in Makati and in QC and in my 7 years of working with the company, I've spent my fair share of time at either site.
The one thing about call centers is that there are just so many people crammed into a single office. 7 years ago, I was just another gay guy who had left home under less than ideal circumstances and was now making it on his own. I had led a very conservative life back in high school and college and had never really hit the scene, and so it was a little weird to be among so many out and proud queer folk of both the male and the female persuasion.
Of course, I found some of the guys cute, or interesting or just plain hot. I used to sit on my cube while waiting for the dialer to connect me with a potential customer and try to catch sight of these guys of interest and compared notes with a friend of mine who took the cube beside mine. Those were much simpler times.
As I started to work my way up the corporate ladder, I found it more and more difficult to talk about employees of the company that I found attractive on one level or another. For now, there weren't that many gay managers in the company, what more fellow managers that I'm actually close enough to in order to be able to discuss such frivolous matters.
For those of you not keeping notes, I'm still an introverted geek above anything else. So just because I'm gay, it doesn't mean I'm the type of person to easily gossip about hot guys seen at the office with just anyone. Plus there's the fact that (1) it's totally inappropriate in an office environment and (2) for the most part I've always been in a relationship throughout my working life, so all I could really do was just watch.
But really, what's a manager to do? I feel like I'm obligated to behave in a more appropriate manner as compared to all others. Some might call me too much of a prude or a nerd for trying to stick to some semblance of ethics, but I'd like to think that my realizing that I'm queer doesn't immediately translate into a need to lose my inhibitions or drop in IQ by about 100 points right away. I, like many other pink professionals, try to maintain a sense of decorum at the office.
I can't imagine what it's like for other queer managers out there who also happen to be single. Or worse, those who don't feel that self-control is warranted in these situations. Call centers, no different from other corporations and major office environments, are filled with people. Statistically speaking, a number of them are bound to be attractive within a country workforce of close to 3,000 people. And then I only get to steal glances here and there and just enjoy the show while I can.
Or am I appealing to some hetereosexual stereotype of how managers should behave? Maybe I'm somewhat playacting a traditional workplace role instead of trying to pave my own path in line with my personal sense of identity or what have you. Whatever it is, this is just a rough documentation of how I feel about things at the time of this writing and now just as a shoot-from-the-hip kind of entry.
Clearly these Technicolor Musings postings need some work before they're trully ready for the presses.
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