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.