Little pieces of my life.
I pressed the buttons with that pen because they are so small that if I used my hands they would've covered most of the view.
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One day, my father came to my room with his guitar. I can't remember how it happened, but we decided to play something out of the blue, just improvising. He played the guitar, I played the synthetizer. It was the only time so far that I did this.
In 2015 I had my first job. It was a tennis club. I was 23. I only worked on sundays and wednesdays. I served customers at the bar. Most of them bought coffee. I had to learn to use the big coffee machine and stuff. I was ususally the only personnel around. My boss was usually not in the club, and I had no coworkers, so I used to feel free to play whatever music I wanted in the place, but nothing too weird. I didn't want to scare the customers. One of the songs that I used to play was Cliffs of Dover. It felt like a very nice tune to play at a sports place. I also cleaned and prepared the tennis courts. Basically whenever a client finished playing, I would charge them, give them my farewell and go straight to preparing the court they used for the next customer and then go back to serving at the bar. Sometimes new clients arrived while I was preparing the court and I would raise my hand to them, signaling that I will be right with them in a moment. I basically swept the court and then walked over it carrying this big thing to... straighten the clay? I don't know. This tennis club was very close to my house. It took me about 20 minutes to go there by bike. I have a couple of pictures and videos from this job, but not much really. Here's what I could find atm.
Anyway, the boss (I think he was the owner of the entire thing? idk) was extremelly agressive. On my first day, a girl who worked the other days was there instructed me on the basics of the place. How to use the big coffee machine, where to put the money, where to do the dishes, etc. But then she told me to never fail in any of these things, not even once, because the boss will get very angry and lose his temper if I do. She said it with a concerned tone really. Fortunately I never screwed up in a way that made the boss angry to me, but I could tell he was passive aggressive all the time whenever I saw him. He was very tall and intimidating as well. I think he had anger issues. There was a street dog that the club had kinda "adopted". Both employees and clients donated a bit every day so we could afford her food. Her name was Venus. She was very cute and sweet, but sometimes she would sneak into the padel courts (yes we had a couple of those as well) and peed in them. This was enough for the boss to say out loud very often that he wanted the dog dead, that he is very close to poisoning her or something. My parents used to go play tennis in this club from time to time. They knew the boss, and that's how they got me into that job to begin with. Good old nepotism. I had been basically a shut in since 2011 and was practically still being one for the most part, since I was only working wednesdays and sundays. However, after a year, I wanted more money. One of my uncles had his own business and he was saying that he might soon need to hire his first employee. He sold irrigation products to clients in the country side. He offered me a full time job. The min wage per month back in the day was 8.000 argentinian pesos, he offered 4.000. Basically a scam, but I was used to getting paid almost nothing. The concept of "monthly wage" was alien to me, and the number 4.000 sounded like a lot to me. I accepted. I was still working at the tennis court though, only on sundays at that time. After a couple of weeks, the fact that saturdays were my only day off started to weight on me, and I decided to quit my tennis club job. I was too blunt though. I called the boss and told him I got another job and that I won't go there anymore. He said I should go for two more weeks before I leave, but I really didn't want to, and, to be fair, it wasn't an official job. There was no law above me. I said I couldn't go anymore, and he got extremely angry. I guess I did make him angry at least once after all. I'm glad it happened on a phone call and not irl. I felt liberated, but then I learned that the boss got super mad at my mother some weeks after that when she went there to play. He was super aggressive to her in front of everyone for some random minor thing. He didn't mention me, but I can't help but feel that I ruined that place for my parents.
In late 2015? or was it 2016? as I said I can't remember the exact years, I joined my uncle's business. He didn't have an office or a warehouse. His own house was all of it. To be honest, it was a disaster. I think there's a sad love story in my uncle's story that explains why he is still single and living alone in a place that is collapsing under mountains of irrigation merch. My first task there was to categorize every piece and put them in a corresponding box and then digitalizing the entire inventory. This took a month. He said he was going to get me a computer, a desk and a monitor. I said I could help choose the computer and monitor since I knew my way around the tech, but he insisted he preferred to do it himself. Once all the merch was put in their own boxes and right places of the house, the living room finally transformed into a walkable place. He put a desk facing a wall, and a computer and a monitor on it. "This is your workstation", he said. Then he brought another desk for his own. Where do you think he put it? facing another wall would be the most intuitive answer, right? or am I crazy? because he positioned it right behind mine, in the middle of the living room basically, to be able to watch me the entire time from behind me. I began by digitalizing the whole inventory as I said, but he didn't like the way I typed. "You're typing too fast" he said. "You will type something wrong". Then he would usually mock me sometimes doing gestures with his hands in the air like I was moving my fingers fast just for the sake of it, like I was trying to pretend to be fast instead of, you know, being fast. I'm not exactly very fast, I have a normal speed for someone that had spent 6 consecutive years as a shut in and that had been using internet forums for 9 years at that point, but you know how boomers type. They wouldn't understand. He didn't even consider the fact that I could look at the screen to see if I was typing something wrong, he didn't understand that I didn't need to look at the keyboard, that I already knew where all the keys were and that I wasn't typing blind like he does. Anyway, as you can tell, I didn't really fancy this job. The part where I had to digitalize our inventory was extremely long and tedious, with me being forced to type slower than I can, limiting my power level unnecessarily, and being asked "what's wrong? why did you stop?" whenever I stopped 2 minutes to rest my hands after 3 hours of non-stop writing. It was really bad. The good part was that my uncle used to go to the clients places from time to time to discuss the projects he was involved in, and this usually meant a couple of days without him constantly judging and looking at me like a cctv camera. I never wanted to work full time, this concept scared the shit out of me as a child. Watching my father leave for work at 6:30am to get back home at like 11pm for years as a kid really did something to me. I didn't want to become that. I accepted my uncle's proposition because his house was very close to mine, so at least there wouldn't be a real commute, but the environment was killing me most of the time.
There were few situations where I accompained him on his business trips around the city. Like in this video from a time where he needed to go get some machinery somewhere. To be honest I can't remember the details.
After one year, I told my uncle that I prefer to start working 4 hours a day instead of 8. He didn't like it, but again, this wasn't an official job, no law above us, so he had to accept. Of course the pay got cut to half as well. I really didn't take my uncle for this type of old school vigilante manager that needs to be watching and whiping his employees at all times. It surprised me, but I had to stop thinking about how that surprised me and start working on how to leave and get something better. I got to a point where I just couldn't keep working there. Most of my work after the initial stage consisted market research. I would see the inventory of every other company that sold these products and digitalie their prices and locations to know how to compete against their prices, and at what prices their imported their products as well, through a site that my uncle paid monthly that revealed this information every day. It was endless. There was no instance in which I "finished" and could relax for a couple of hours. This was updating all the time and the amounts were unbearable. Also, the constant observation, him sitting behind me, making sure I didn't stop typing for a second, judging me for typing "fast", never considering my suggestions at work ever. I felt like crying a couple of times. I couldn't stand it anymore. I had to quit.
In 2017, I quit my uncle's business. My parents weren't mad or happy. Their reaction was like "... okaaaayy... I trust your judgment. I'm sure you can find something better. The pay and growth there were almost non existent, so we respect your decision to work somewhere better". The problem, that better place wasn't coming. from 2017 to January 2019, two years, I spent a lot of time and energy applying for thousands of jobs, about 3.400 to be exact, to any job that supposedly anyone without experience can enter. I was constantly working on my resumee, asking relatives and friends for their feedback on it. I applied both online and irl to all the places that had this little sign saying that they were needing an employee. My family wasn't struggling economically, but I was 25 with zero money and zero career whatsoever, and my parents's patience was only going down. It got to a point where I couldn't leave my room without them impatiently asking me when I will get a job. They wouldn't kick me out of the house or anything, they didn't exactly need me to get a job. It was a dignity thing for them. That's not important though. I also wanted to get a job, regardless of them needing me to or not, or of whatever reason they thought I should. I just wanted money like anyone else and I was willing to take any job for it, but the problem was that they didn't seem to believe me that I was actually trying. This phase really hurt me. The feeling after being rejected in 3.400 different places did a number on me for years, and the fact that my parents thought I wasn't even trying didn't help. I felt trapped and constantly attacked. My father didn't stop talking about how getting these jobs that don't require experience are super easy to get and how they aren't even actual "jobs". He said I should just walk into a restaurant and say "I can work here from now on" and that I will get accepted. That might have worked when he was young, but obviously not anymore, not in these times. In December 2018 I received a call from one of my cousins. His father had his own business. Small, but bigger than my other uncle's. My cousin had worked there before and was aware of my job hunt and told me that after talking about it with his father, they were considering hiring me. Finally, this whole nightmare might end.
In January 2019, the 2th I believe, I started working for this other uncle of mine. His business was a bit bigger than my other uncle's as I said. He had two offices and approx 40 employees. I was hired to work full time at their office that was at the very working core of the capital city, which was 2 and a half hours away from home... Could this be it? what I was fearing since I was a kid? what I saw my father do? Basically not live between Monday and Friday? I had to leave at around 6am to get there on time. It was a total of 5 hours of commute every day. Worked from 9 to 18, so it was 9 hours of work + 5 hours of commute. 14 hours of being outside because of work, only 2 hours of free time if I wanted to sleep 8 hours. But the torture didn't end there. My job was actually pretty similar to my previous job at my other uncle's. I had to fill a database with unending information that updated every day. And, get this. Me and my new coworkers were being observed by actual cctv cameras this time. Hey, at least I had coworkers this time around. It was my actual first time having those. I wondered how that would be. How that would change the experience. The truth is, the coworkers didn't really talk to eachother. The whole place felt like a medieval church. And my unending work without being able to take a rest was again torturing me. At that moment, I began to wonder. "Am I like this? Am I unable to stand any job? Perhaps no matter what job I do, I will always feel tortured. Perhaps I just can't work". I tried to endure, but after just two weeks, I collapsed. I asked my uncle for a small meeting. I thanked him for this opportunity, but told him that I couldn't do this type of job anymore. Bear in mind that this was my first time having an actual official work with laws and a provided health insurance, but still the torture was too much. He didn't want to let me go, so he suggested a change of position. He said he was also looking for someone to bring the papers between the different offices and clients and banks and all of that stuff, but none of his employees wanted, because it implied being outside and walking and using public transport all the time and seeing clients and other employees at every stop. A nightmare for most people apparently, but for me it sounded pretty fun. Although, in the back of my mind, the fear still lingered. What if even THAT tortured me? but I accepted. Turns out that I actually enjoyed it. I mean, it was a job, I still was doing it only because it gave me money, but I didn't... suffer from it? Being outside meant that there was no cctv camera at work watching my every move. It was also good for my health. I walked a lot every day. The best part? after a week, my uncle told me that this role is needed but not as much as my initial role, so I should go 3 days per week instead of 5. The pay was lower ofc, but I didn't care, I never wanted a lot of money, so this was a perfect balance. My usual work week was Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, but it changed often. More than enough time to comfortably binge play Sekiro and Elden Ring when they came out. The downside to this was that being so much time outside can be dangerous. I had to go to places all around the city and even the suburbs sometimes. My map of clients and offices was really very big, and sometimes I had to walk in places and times that weren't very safe. Once, a person approached to me to offer me socks. It's very normal here to see people selling socks in the streets. Why socks? I have no idea. Perhaps some obscure economic factor that facilitates this. They are usually very insisting, and I had to walk around in formal business clothes, kinda like your typical japanese salary man, which attracted these people more than usual. They usually were just there, standing, but as soon as they saw me, their pupils turned into $ symbols and approached to me. I was very used to this, I learn how to deal with them. I wasn't going for a walk, I was doing my job on a schedule. I understnad that they were doing their job as well, but this happened so often, with everyone of them, in every block, that I had to learn how to deal with them. I just ignored them. I didn't slow down, I didn't even look at them, I just said "No thanks" sometimes adding a "sorry" at the end, but never stopping. This made some of them mad. They ususally insisted, following me for an entire block until they gave up. A couple of them didn't give up without getting mad and giving me a little angry push. This one time though, one approached when there was nobody else around in the streets. As usual, I applied my ignoring mechanic, but then I walked into a small hall I had to walk through, and suddenly, two more people joined the first one and grabbed me. "Get his phone! get his phone!" one of them yelled quietly while the others were trying to put their hands into my pockets. I managed to break free and run. I'm not sure how I was able to break free. I think they didn't coordinate their movements too well. The two that were grabbing me tried to reach my pockets at the same time, none of them was using all of their strength to grab me, a clumsy moment probably, enough for them to miss their grip on me. It all lasted only for like 3 seconds though, it happened in an instant. I ran to the block's corner, the three guys chase me, but the corner had other people walking by. We were all exposed now. They tried to pretned nothing was happening and slowly walked back to the hall. That was the worst case, but a couple of similar ones happened too in the course of the 3.5 years that I worked that role. There were a lot of crazy pepole too. You get to see a lot of things if you spend a lot of time outside very often. I was once walking and someon that walked my opposite direction pat my back, like they knew me and were greeting me or something, but they didn't say anything, they just pat my back. I was like "ok they surely mistook me for someone else, I will ignore them and keep walking", but after like 10 steps, my curiosity got the best of me. I stopped and turned to see who that was. There he was, a stranger, standing in the middle of the sidewalk between a sea of walking randoms, staring directly at me with his eyes wide open, with an expression that felt like they were waiting for me to respond back, very menacingly. I slowly turned to my original direction and kept walking away. Crazy random little situations like this happened a lot. In 2020, the covid pandemic, hit. My uncle made everything possible to register me as an essential worker, so the quarantine didn't apply to me. I was annoyed because I wanted to stay home like everyone else. Being a shut in is my comfort zone, but I still had to go. There was something nice about this though. The trains were absolutely empty. The busiest streets, completely empty. I was alone. It was surreal. Here's a video from 2021 of me going back home after a long work day.
In 2022 I got tired of feeling stuck in life and decided to start a career, any career. I just pick computer science. It was going to start in August. I believed I could both work and study as long as I kept working 3 days a week. But then, by an extreme coincidence, my uncle called and said they were going to need me to go there from monday to friday, 5 days, no longer 3 days. You see, the pandemic changed the world a bit, including the way some parts of business were done. I used to move papers from office to office, from client to client, but all of that had moved to digital after the pandemic. I could have always been digital, they just preferred not to, but this time, they had to, and there was no way back, so my role was greatly diminished. My uncle needed me to do my initial position that I was originally hired to do. I couldn't do it, I couldn't psychologically stand it, and I also wanted to study a career now. There was no way. I had to quit. My parents used to tell me that I have to grow in my working career, and they kept talking about how my current job wasn't enough for that, so when I told them that I quit and that I was going to start studying at college, I thought they were going to be happy about it. They weren't. They were angry that I quit. Insisted that I should've found another job before quitting. They also weren't happy that I start studying in college. Said 30 years was too old to start studying, that that train had already passed for me, and that I had to only focus on working at this point. I didn't listen to them. I mean, I wanted to work while studying, I didn't want to spend the next 6 years studying without working, but deep inside, I was still haunted by those two years from 2017 to 2019 of constant laboral reject, and feared it might happen again. I started studying, I had to pass the three entry exams before I got to the actual career subjects. I won't explain the details here, but long story short, I failed. By december 2022, I was unemployed and dropping the career I convinced myself I would finish only 5 months before. By january 2023 I felt like I had nothing again, and I wasn't willing to send another 3 thousand resumees for nothing. My internet friends insisted that I should sell art commissions. Drawing digital had been one of my hobbies/passions for a long time and they insisted I could do well in doing that as a job. I listened.
In late January of 2023, I sold my first art commission. I prepared a huge excel sheet with my earnings and whatnot. I was finally making money without needing to leave my house, drawing characters on my computer. It sounded too good, but it really wasn't. Drawing is an incredibly exhausting thing for me. I love it, but it draws a lot of brain power. Perhaps because I'm not good enough, but I just can't milk it, much less the creativity needed for it. I wasn't seizing the full potential of it, I was taking way too much time for most commissions, and making very little money. To make things worse, it left me without the energy to draw the things that I wanted to draw. My drawing hobby was kinda ruined tbh. I remembering taking a break from commissions in December 2023 to draw many sketches of Mau that I didn't have energy to produce during that year. I was depressed. Some clients were sweet, but some were a pain. I tried many ways, changes of mind and strategies to try to make this better, to make it work, but nothing would. By late 2024, I decided I should switch jobs. But how? I still had this fear of rejection that I got from being constantly rejected from thousands of jobs in 2017-2019. But I had learned something by that point. I realized that every single person that I knew, except for only one or two, got their jobs from contacts... including myself! so I had to clearly put all of my energy on contacts instead of sending to places without them. I worked on my resumee, updated it, and started asking relatives if they knew by any chance any place they could hire me or whatever. I got recommended to like 7 places, and I had an interview in all of them. Mind you, from my 3.400 attempts at those other years, I got 2 interviews out of them. And here I got 7 interviews out of 7. This was clearly the way to go. I wasn't accepted in the first 6, but at least I was getting interviews. I had to keep walking that path. Eventually, one of them accepted me.
In 2025-08-11 I was hired by this company. My first time at a big company, an international one. It's in a very fancy part of the city. Everyone thinks I'm made of money whenever I mention where I work now. The pay is really just okay. All of them saying that make at least twice as much as I make, but this is enough for me really. It's a full time job, but I am only expected to go to the office 3 days a week, and can work the other 2 from home. I wouldn't like to tell this to my parents, but, to be honest, that's the only reason I accepted it. That fancy place is fara way, two hours of commute. I couldn't stand that five days a week. I'm working from home today, and I'm writing on my lunch break right now. I couldn't be doing this if I was in the office. My team leader is... kinda blunt and aggressive tbh, but everyone else is nice. I am finally no longer being watched all the time. Going to the office is a pain in the ass, but somehow being there feels... a bit chill? I can leave for a small walk any time, the place is very safe. Sometimes I use my lunch break to nap on the grass of a park that is near the office, hearing the birds chirp. I do quality check now, it's a bit tedious, and I'd rather walk as a job like I did from 2019 to 2022, but that job is gone for good, and I got paid very little back then compared to this. I think I'm at my best and most comfortable work period so far. I still wish I worked less than 5 days a week though. I'd prefer them to tell me something like "Hey Ando it's not like we don't need you but we need you a bit less so you will work 4 days a week instead of 5, and your pay will be cut accordingly". I don't care if I get paid less. I value my free time a lot. I work to live, not the other way around. I wouldn't work at all if it wasn't necessary... well probably I would, but way less, and in something that I find personally fulfilling I guess? But yeah, this is fine, considering the shithole the world has transformed into in recent decades. Here's a silly video of me being stopped and interviewed on my way to work because it was cold and I wasn't wearing any coat.