Working for a customer service
Like many of the Italians who emigrate abroad, if you have any humanities degree you find yourself in a multinational that does accounting or customer service in Italian ... in short, in a call center.
Every job must be respected, but we also owe respect to ourselves, to our personal, emotional and intellectual growth. I found myself working for customer service in Krakow. In an office with about 250 handsome people crammed side by side, enthusiasm reigned at first and then slowly the days became one like the other, waiting for the end-of-month salary to arrive. The activity was monotonous, often alienating. It made you repeat the same things to people who didn't understand it. Or to people you would have even agreed with.
The schemes of a multinational create an assembly line that often crushes creativity. Little by little you don't even remember what you did during the day. In that you did the same things as yesterday, the day before yesterday and the day before. Without being able to customize anything and used to being constantly monitored by cameras, like a monkey in the zoo. They get you used to the idea that everything is monitored: how much you work, how you work, where you go and above all how much time you spend in the bathroom. Change company? It just meant changing the zoo.
Polish lessons
On the one hand, the sense of duty, to work as you are paid to do it. On the other hand, the awareness that increasing productivity would only raise expectations without adding anything except stress and competitiveness.
One first reaction was to create my own business - it was born Polish lessons.blogspot.it. I reused the experience accumulated with a bogus project contract in an Italian language school. The site was created in the evening, after work, where I was trying to reserve some energy to devote to something that would really help others in line with my vocation as a linguist. Learning the language of others means being able to communicate in the end, avoiding misunderstandings.
The multinational environment allows you to be in contact with people who speak different languages, so that you can improve your communication skills. This of course if the environment is relaxed. I decided to change office and join a group of specialists to do some career. Nobody wanted to go and I understood why: I found myself with crazy Polish supervisors who were watching us at the screen in view, as well as forbidding any chattering longer than 120 seconds. In such an environment, some indigenous colleagues then turned into kapo, as if for some reason it was their duty to report something to the supervisor: the 5 extra minutes of coffee break, the fact that in addition to having gone to the bathroom one passed through the cook something to eat, etc.
The important thing is always to leave
In turn, there was no question of becoming a supervisor, since even those who corrected your e-mails in Italian were exclusively Polish, and no matter how hard I tried you never spoke perfectly “the same language”.
The blog grew in the evenings and on weekends and I wanted to turn it into a business by selling advertising space on the site. Got some traffic, after six months of trying I got the Google AdSense partnership, but the earnings were and remain low. I then looked for businesses interested in advertising. Krakow Apartments were ideal, as they were dealing with Italian tourists in Poland, but unfortunately they did not reply to my e-mail.
What have I done? I wrote an article about them, sharing it on all the Facebook groups of Italians in Poland. A surge in visits to their site coming from my blog. In a few minutes I was contacted by the owner first on Facebook and then, asking for the number, by mobile. I therefore did not get revenue from advertising, but I was directly hired for a second job. In this start-up I managed articles for websites, marketing, personal recruitment. Finally they could use their energies to grow, while I then kept safe work in the multinational in the afternoon until midnight.
It is really true that sometimes you start with the intention of arriving on one side and things change with the path and you arrive from quite another. The important thing is always to leave.
Polish multinational: how to survive - Part 1
last edit: 2017-02-22T16:23:56+01:00
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