Thursday, June 28, 2007

My job

Since September 1994 I work as a bilingual secretary for an important accounting firm based in the World Trade Center in the capital city. Here I am part of a team of 25.

Established in 1971, the company specializes in shopping center management, the promotion and development of real estate projects (offices, apartment buildings and shopping centers) and consultation services for national corporations and holding companies.

I answer directly to the owner, and in addition to the usual secretarial duties I also perform in a variety of capacities: from scheduling a meeting with the Vice President to arranging a family holiday or booking the gardener. I organize a degree of my bosses domestic life as well as business activities.

I am a hard working professional individual with great deal of integrity and loyalty. In the workplace I am relaxed, confident and very communicative. I enjoy working closely with people, sharing ideas and skills whenever possible. I am used to work under pressure and I am very flexible and adaptive.

When I joined this company was to work as a second secretary for my bosses father, then the Director of the firm, but his unexpected death a month later, put my position under review. My current boss inherited the heavy responsibility of moving ahead the already succesfull family business. He was overwhelmed with the flow of work he was then to reorganize and he thought that I was worth keeping.

All over these 13 years here I've learnt a lot, I grew as an employee but also as a human being. With my work mates I shared important moments in my life: the birth of G and B, my separation, the painful process to overcome my emotional crisis, my joy when I travelled to the UK, my happiness when I finally met C, my wedding, the birth of our Angel. You can say we are big family, and my boss proved to be a charismatic leader.

However, all this time, someone has always been casting a shadow over this (shall I say aparent?) harmony. And mine is the misfortune of sharing the same physical space with this person since then. I am not going to describe here how her aggressivity and bad treatments have been torturing me without a break. Suffice to say that this kind of attitudes or behaviours, in other parts of the world, are treated on court. I am not the exclusive addressee of her shouts, screams and swears: every single person in this office has been systematically, the target of her insults depending on the level of connection their assignments have with hers.

At the moment, the heavy atmosphere and the sensation of oppression is becoming too dense. There are also other important reasons that are encouraging me to search for another job. Firstly, I was trained as a translator so now, I really would like to work as one. I also have the necessity to improve my salary and, above all, I am moved by the challenge of progressing, of learning new things and having new experiences.

The search has to be done cautiously: my boss being an important and an influential member of the business community, I need to act with high degree of composure. My salary is also pretty good for the average labour market. All these reasons added to the fact that this society is struggling to overcome the financial crisis we experimented in 2002, contribute to make this search still more difficult.

I've already applied to a couple of vacancies so far.

The first one was last March at the British Embassy. The position was described under the title "Projects Officer/Translator/Web Editor" and I sensed it was exactly the opportunity I was looking for. However, 15 days later I accidentaly discovered that the job had a name, and that they had a person for that position already.

The second opportunity was at the United Nations Program for America. I applied to the position of "Secretary/Translator" last May and when I phoned yesterday to ask for some information they explained to me that the first selection for interviews was not done yet. So I am highly suspicious that this could be a similar case to the first one.

It is frustrating but I took this decision of moving on, and I am going to stick at it. Because I like the challenge, because I need to progress and because I need to feel content at my work again.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Explanation

I thought the name of my blog wasn't reflecting exactly what you can find here.

I still feel I am some kind of a sex fiend, and my husband says I am a one track mind: I am in a path of self discovery and this also includes a sexual awakening.

However, there are many other subjects that I would also like to explore here. And after all, I haven't been talking much about sex lately. Here you can also find my thoughts about relationships, my concerns, my ups and downs, my projects and whatever it is occupying the rest of my mind that is not busy with sex.

So, I decided my blog needed another name.

Welcome back.

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Update

After so much silence (although I've been following my blogger mates' adventures and posting some comments here and there) I managed to organize a little bit my time to try and make an update of the past couple of months.

To put it briefly, either I was too sad or too busy to write or post anything. My last post was about the events in my life during last Easter Week, and for a while I was so upset that I decided not to write in an attempt to stop drowning in my own misery.

It took me quite a long time to rebuild myself after those events. Whilst I continue with my mundane activities, juggling with work, the kids, the family needs and the housework, deep inside I felt something was broken inside of me.

I wanted to be furious, I wanted to hate him for the pain he had caused me. But I couldn't. I was too upset and so dissapointed I couldn't even feel anger. And above all, I was afraid of not being able to heal that bleeding wound.

We had some open, frank conversations. He said to me that he was ashamed of what he had done, he said sorry so many times, that I finally screamed that the appologizes were turning meaningless. Despite all his words, my mind couldn't deal with the idea that what he wrote on that emails was (is?) what he feels for real, and that was for sure, hard to live with.

However I managed.

I managed to recover myself. And finally, I came back.

The last couple of months life has been stressfull. Rushing all the time, dealing with the house work, the kids needs, and restarting the full time job at the office, all that mixed up with sleepless nights.

Me time does not exist at the moment. Trying to reorganize my thoughts proves to be a challenge, and I am afraid, I am not being successfull at all. Even posting something coherent here has been impossible.

Added to that, I do not blog from home but from my pc at the office. The only pc at home is C's, no way that I could use it for blogging purposes. Of course, he would let me use it if extremely neccessary AND... he would also lean over my shoulder while I type. Not that he is curious about what I have to say/write here but he is extremely jealous of his pc. However, even if I have the chance to blog from home, I would be sacrificing my time with the kids and that is exactly what I do not want to do.

So there you are, all my excuses for being so quiet all this time.

Now, I feel the necessity to come back again.