Barefoot in the Real World

STRANGER THAN FICTION

by Jeneen R. Garcia

Published in Sun.Star Cebu in 2002/2003

When I graduated, I swore I’d never take a job that would make me wear closed shoes.

Let me put it this way: I’m what you would call “in perpetual beach mode”.  Ever since I can remember, I’ve always preferred tank tops to t-shirts, shorts and billowy skirts to jeans, sandals (or better yet, bare feet) to sneakers…you get the drift. This is a tropical country--why should I suffer in the heat for some 400-year old dress code imported from Europe?

During those last few months in college, people around campus were in corporate (pronounced corprit) clothing, going to corprit job interviews at high-rise, corprit buildings.

Our placement office held seminars on power-dressing--how the right shoes, suit (earth tones, not black, and never pastels, or you’ll look like a pushover) and stripes (nothing too aggressive) could get you that big, fat paycheck.

I said to myself that if a company needed me to wear heels and a stupid pencil skirt just to get the job done, then the job wasn’t worth doing at all. And there was the issue of the sky.

I was having dinner with a friend who had just signed a two-year contract with a high-paying consulting firm. He looked strangely sad, considering he was starting at P14,000 a month, entry-level. And this was when the peso was only forty to a dollar.

Then he said: “When I left the building, I looked up and I suddenly thought: ‘This is the last time I’ll ever see the sky.’.” I laughed at his melodrama. Still--

I had a new requirement: my work had to be at the beach. Or in a place with trees. In Metro Manila, that only meant Quezon City--the land of NGOs and government offices. All the get-rich firms that offered travel opportunities were either in Ortigas or Makati, where plants only serve as accents to tastefully decorated offices.

Unfortunately, when I started asking around, even the best NGOs paid only a little above minimum wage. I didn’t get an expensive education for a break-even income, did I? I went out and bought a cream-colored suit for an interview in Ortigas.

But I’ve learned to balance my need for fancy dinners with the “psychic rewards” of loving the work I do. Trade-offs are a fact of the real world. At least my mojos let my feet breathe easy every day. They’re no sexy Italian sandals, but hey, do I really want to wear something that costs more than dinner for 25 homeless families? (Do I hear sourgraping?).

And the suit? Never got to wear it. It got stuck to the iron the day of my interview and remains in my closet to this day.