When I was 21: My first job interview
When I was 21, I had a list of 21 things to do — one was to be a journalist and see the world (and, believe it or not, I also wanted to be able to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” which, or so I learned in school, is what journalism is about). The other 20 on my must-do list? I don’t remember, my memory fails me now.
But this much I remember: Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman (or was it Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain or Don McLean’s American Pie ?... oh, never mind) was playing on the radio that muggy morning in March as I was dressing up for my first-ever job interview. With a pocketful of dreams but not a centavo worth of clue as to how the interview would go, I stormed the gates of heaven with bribes and prayers the night before that crucial day and took out my best working girl clothes and stockings from my sister’s closet. (Yes, back in those days, an outfit wasn’t complete without those thigh-high, tight nylon socks enough to cut off blood circulation in the legs. A man must have designed the stockings, but I digress.) Of course, I wasn’t going to that job interview without slathering gobs of foundation on my face, as if it just fell flat on a bed of Liwayway gawgaw.
I was eight months shy of 21 and a college senior (and if I may add, I was also president of the Pax Romana, the student Catholic organization that none of my activist classmates wanted to join despite threats of burning in hell) when the editor of a soon-to-open newspaper called up my professor and the adviser of my AB Journalism class at the University of Santo Tomas (he was also a former newspaper editor) and asked him to send some of his best students (read: teacher’s pets) for interview because he had an opening for a female reporter in his paper. I was one of the three female students sent. But on the day of the interview, my two classmates didn’t show up. Did they get shot at a student rally denouncing police brutality? Were they run over by a container van going to Intramuros? Nope. One got the flu (or did she get a bad case of the jitters?). One got lost.
I got the job!
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Postscript: And then there was this second job interview
Though I’m one of the veteran (read: oldest) staffers in the Philippine STAR’s Lifestyle Section, I vehemently deny rumors being circulated by my “detractors” (attention: Tanya and Kathy) that I interviewed Judas at the Last Supper or covered the parting of the
The STAR is only my second job after the first newspaper I worked for folded up. My former (present and future) editor Millet Mananquil, the best editor and best friend anyone can have, and the late Betty Go-Belmonte, founding chairman of the Philippine STAR, saved me from unemployment.
And how was my second job interview?
Great! Betty Go-Belmonte asked me if I could start work right away and I asked her if I could take a one-week vacation before I started work. She agreed without hesitation. Feeling lost after I lost my first job, I felt right at home at the STAR when on my first day at work, Betty Go-Belmonte told me, “Ching, don’t call me Mrs. Belmonte, call me Betty. Everybody calls me Betty.” Once, I received a call at the desk (yes, I started as a deskwoman at the STAR before the fax machine and the Internet were invented and reporters phoned in their stories, and I often went home with a stiff neck) and I shouted at the top of my lungs, “Betty, there’s a call for you.” From the corner of my eye, I could see not just a few dagger looks aimed at me. The guys at the male-dominated desk must have told themselves, “Who’s this upstart who’s already on a first-name basis with the chairman of the STAR on her first day on the job?”
A few weeks later, while we were enjoying a snack of ginataang halo-halo after work, Betty asked me when my birthday is. We found out that we had the same birth month and she suggested that we celebrate our birthdays together — with moist chocolate cake, which we both loved like crazy! I can’t count the chocolate cakes I’ve eaten — and won’t dare count the pounds I’ve put on — since then, and hopefully I’ll still be around to write my piece entitled “When I was 61.”
