Meanwhile, the sun sets in Manila and Filipinos are ready to start their workday at the call centres. While the typical workforce in Manila begins to settle down for the night, the faceless army of call centre operators are preparing to take your call.
The lives of operators, armed with dual monitors and headsets are drastically altered in order to synchronise with Western culture. This synchronisation ensures that Filipinos are better suited to assist the American customer.
Some workers describe adjusting their body clocks to parallel sleep habits of vampires, but this just scratches the surface of their social and cultural sacrifice. You can see call centre people setting themselves apart because they dress better, they have more money, and they go to very expensive places.
You can see the latest gadgets on them. Noriel Atos is a call centre salesperson working for a company that sells American beauty products to wealthy consumers around the world. At 6 am she nurses a Red Horse beer and a cigarette with some of her colleagues who have headed to relax at a busy bar in Ortigas, a central business district in the capital.
It may surprise some that 6 am is a busy time at a local pub. The pub owners are certainly not complaining, in fact, they are happy to adjust. Retail and service industries are doing business with these emerging Filipino socialites, who are dressed in designer clothing, wielding the latest technology in their palms. Izza Trovela is an operations manager at Acquire Asia Pacific, a business process outsourcing company that manages hundreds of accounts from Australia, the US, Canada and Europe.
