What I Almost Gave Up to Believe in a Job Called Manila Pacific Outsourcing

The recruiter’s message came at 11:47 at night, right after I’d finished my shift at the call center on Aurora Boulevard. Congratulations, you have been shortlisted for a remote data entry position with Manila Pacific Outsourcing, salary forty five thousand pesos, training starts Monday.

I read it three times standing at the jeepney stop near Cubao, the smell of fish balls and exhaust thick in the air, and I felt my chest do something it hadn’t done in months. Hope.

My name is Marites, I am twenty six, and at that point I had applied to eleven jobs in four months. Eleven.

I kept count in a note on my phone because counting made the rejection feel like something I was tracking instead of something happening to me. So when a company actually wrote back, when someone actually said yes, I did not stop to ask why they wanted me so badly without an interview.

The recruiter called himself Jerome. He had a company logo in his profile picture, blue and silver, very professional looking. He told me the position required a “verification deposit” of three thousand pesos, refundable after my first month, to confirm I was serious about the role.

Baka isipin mo scam ito, he wrote, laughing with one of those crying laughing emojis, pero ganito talaga ang process ngayon, andaming ghosters eh. You might think this is a scam, but this is really how it works now, too many people ghost.

I told my best friend Deo about it over rice and tapa the next morning, at the carinderia near Gateway Mall where we always split a plate because neither of us could afford a whole one alone. Deo put his fork down slowly.

Marites, that is exactly how they get people. They make you feel special first. Then they ask for money.

But he sent me the certificate of registration. SEC number and everything.

Anybody can screenshot a certificate.

I did not want to hear it. I had already told my mother in Batangas that I found work, real work, work I could do from the sari-sari store’s spare room with a borrowed laptop. She had cried on the phone, the good kind of crying, and told my younger brother to stop skipping his allowance money because ate was going to help now. I could not call her back and say I made a mistake. Not yet.

So on Thursday I took my mother’s ring, the one with the small pearl that used to be my grandmother’s, the one I was never supposed to touch except to admire it in its little cloth pouch, and I brought it to a pawnshop on EDSA near Santolan. The man behind the counter barely looked at it before writing a number on a slip of paper. Two thousand eight hundred pesos. I needed three thousand.

I stood outside the pawnshop for a long time. Jeepneys went past, honking, packed, the barkers shouting destinations I wasn’t going to. A boy sold cigarettes one stick at a time near the corner.

I thought about my mother’s hands, how she always touched her ring finger when she was worried, out of habit, even on the nights the ring wasn’t there because we’d pawned it before, years ago, for my brother’s tuition, and gotten it back six months later with money I never asked where she found.

I opened my messages again. Jerome had sent a follow up. Miss Marites, deadline for verification is 5pm today, otherwise we move to the next applicant. Andami pong gustong pumasok dito. Many people want to get in here.

Something about that line stopped me. Andami pong gustong pumasok. If so many people wanted in, why was he still messaging a stranger at midnight, twice, chasing three thousand pesos like it mattered more than the job itself.

I called Deo. He picked up on the first ring, already knew from my voice.

Do not send it, he said. Come to the mall, I’ll help you look for something. Real something.

I did not send it. I walked back into the pawnshop, and the same man, without expression, wrote my mother’s ring back into a slip and handed it to me, no charge for wasting his time apparently, and I held it in my closed fist the whole ride home like it could still slip away from me even inside my hand.

Jerome messaged four more times over the next two days. The tone changed each time, first understanding, then a little sharper, baka po kasi hindi nyo talaga kailangan ng trabaho, maybe you don’t really need the job, like he was trying to shame me back into it.

Then nothing. I looked up Manila Pacific Outsourcing two weeks later out of curiosity and found a Facebook post from another woman, in Iloilo this time, describing the exact same message, the exact same three thousand pesos, the exact same Jerome, except she had paid it, and never heard from him again, and had to explain to her husband where the money went.

I still have not found real work, not the kind my mother is telling the neighbors about, not yet. I go back to the call center some nights when they need extra bodies for overflow shifts, answering complaints about internet bills from people in Ohio and Texas who have no idea there is a girl in Quezon City trying to buy back a little pearl ring one shift at a time, except she never had to buy it back at all, because she never let it go, and some nights that is the only thing that feels like a win.

My mother still touches her ring finger when she worries. She does not know how close it came to sitting in a pawnshop drawer because I was too proud to say I still had nothing to offer her but hope. I have not told her about Jerome. I do not think I ever will.

Sometimes I wonder about the other Marites out there, the ones who did send the money, who are sitting somewhere right now doing the same math I almost did, weighing a family heirloom against a stranger’s deadline, and I want to reach through the screen and tell them what I wish someone had told me before I stood outside that pawnshop on EDSA.

If a job needs your money before it gives you a paycheck, it was never a job. It was always just waiting to see how much you would give up to believe in it.