Life is work as work is life

I have received and browsed the document a week ago, but it’s only now that I really read its content. I missed the important word in the 2nd page “NOT”, now I’m facing again the same problem.

It was only 2 months after that event in PICC, when I come across this company in the PLDT directory. Excited and in need to have a job, I called them and asked for a vacancy. Luckily, they are looking for someone to fill in the position. After an almost a month of preliminaries, I got to have the so called ‘first day in work’.

I started as simple as a staff; I am just receiving instructions on what to do. But when I was just starting to get used to my undemanding work and barely after being employed as permanent, my supervisor, who have spent nearly 10 years with the company, decided to take a leave and try to have other working environment. Although there are changes, I did not have much difficulty adjusting on her absence because with our technology today, it seemed like she’s just here with me in the office, and so I still work under her instructions. Another thing is I consoled myself that she’ll be back and everything will turn back to what it is used to be. Few months before her supposed return, I received her email: irrevocable resignation.

It gave me mixed emotions: I was scared coping up with the work, making decisions, talking to people, and doing things on my own. For few days, I was always like in a daydream with questions popping up on my mind: How will I do it? Can I do it? Will I survive? But later on, I started to realize that there’s nothing I can do anymore. I would be very selfish and self-center if I will leave my work just like that, or force her to come back, she had already given 10 years of her life for the company, maybe it’s now my turn!?! I just took what happened as a challenge. I have to work hard, and do everything I can do to have journals on time. But the most challenging and difficult task I have to endure is to have available papers for an issue.

The journal has been circulating for over 30 years now, featuring over a hundreds of different papers and studies. Like any other thing, the publication has also experienced its great abundance… abundance on papers/articles, which are submitted not only by local authors but also by foreign enthusiasts. It was the time that our journal is the only one of its kind circulating in Asia. But as years went by, changes also went on, other publications came in and competition arises, and articles/papers came to us less and less.

After three decades, we only now have at least five authors, who are dedicated to share their studies/papers for our journal. I really felt bad because given the subject that the journal is dedicated to and the advance technology that this generation have, we should have been receiving now more and more papers for the journal. But I understand that it won’t happen that easy because of the competition, we are competing with foreign publications. I have talked to some authors a year ago, and they refuse to give us the chance to publish their works in our journal because they do not want to have any conflict with the submission of it to foreign publications, and also money really matters. While we are giving a very minimal amount of peso as an honorarium, maybe our counterparts are offering dollars. Well, that’s life!

That is my dilemma now, but I guess that would always be my dilemma every start and middle of the year. If I have no enough articles or worse if there’s nothing at all, how can I produce an issue of the journal? Every article is like a medication that keeps the ailing journal live, and the journal is the reason why I am still here… and I am not yet ready to leave my work so I need to use all my strength and all my brain cells to seek for more than enough medication to keep life going…