My name is Jess Guim, and currently residing in New York City. I’m an OFW, overseas Filipino worker. But unlike other OFWs, who were forced to go to other countries to work and earn money for their families, I’m an OFW by accident. In 1992, my wife who’s working as registered Nurse in New York City, petitioned me and our young boys to stay with her in US.
Life is hard in America for husbands of Nurses, who were forced to stay in US for the sake of family togetherness. Jobs that would fit our experiences in the Philippines are very hard to find. That’s why there are couples who preferred to divorce each other, when a husband would rather stay in the Philippines and enjoy their good-paying jobs as doctors, engineers, lawyers, and businessmen in our own country. I was in the category of a businessman who was just starting to rise, before I decided to stay here in US. I surrendered that lifestyle for the sake of my children who wanted to stay here in US with their Mom.
I landed on my first job here in New York City in 1994 as a mailroom personnel. Work as you may think was not an easy job. Working in the mailroom was not all about machine-stamping the mails, receiving mails and delivering them to individual employees in different offices. The hardest part of it was when I had to carry boxes that were bigger and heavier than me from cargo trucks, and stockpile them in a warehouse.
In 1995 I got a job as a customer service representative of a Filipino-owned long distance telephone service company. The company did not last long when the two partners split the company’s stocks and ownerships. The hardest part of this job was when the service was down, because of the conflict between the two owners when they were about to close the company. Hundreds of Filipinos from all over America would call us every second of the day, asking us what’s happening with the service and when would the service be back. My saga with the screaming, mad callers created a fear in me – fear to pick up the phone when it rings, fear from the telephone ring itself.
In 1997 I finally landed a job that I embraced as a second career until now – as a computer engineer. How I started to learn and became proficient in this field was also an accident. It all started with the Philippine-made computer I brought with me when I migrated here in 1992. With it’s price of PhP 52,000.00 when I bought it in Manila, I thought it was the most precious item I brought with me in America. I later found it out to be a piece of junk, when I compared it to genuine IBM computers in computer stores. Considering the price of that computer, I did not throw it away. Instead, I decided to keep it as a playtoy by breaking it apart and building it back from pieces and parts – a way of killing my time while I was unemployed, simply babysitting our newborn baby.
I could still remember how that computer, IBM-clone, was built by a one-handed salesboy (yes, a mere salesboy) in a computer store in Manila. So, I thought, if a one-handed person could build a computer, how much more myself who have two hands? If others could do it, I could do it, too! So, after breaking it apart, I started picking-up the parts scattered on my table, and I placed them back one piece at a time to where they were originally inserted. When the last part of the computer had been inserted to where it belong, I became hesitant to power on the computer, because of an old fear still lingering on my mind. When I was a kid, I used to experiment our battery-powered transistor radio by attaching the negative and positive wires for its batteries to the live electrical wires of our house. I thought I could help my family save from buying batteries every week, if it was directly powered by the electricity of our house. But I got wrong when the transistor radio exploded just immediately after I attached the second live wire to the radio’s battery holder. It was not only the radio that exploded, but also the main switch of our house’s electrical system. I was lucky I was not electrified. That shocking experience remained in my memory even up to now.
After few moments of hesitance, I finally decided to place the computer’s power chord to an electrical plug, and powered on the computer. Alas, it worked back successfully! The fascination of breaking that computer apart and rebuilding it back, was not only killing my time as a jobless father in New York City. It also gave me an idea to make it as a new career in America!
Time had come when breaking apart and rebuilding back that old computer became boring to me. So, I decided to build my new computer from scratch, by buying spare parts from mail order companies. I bought more books on computers to do my self-study on this challenging machine. Every time I bought a new computer, I would not buy them to be loved and embraced like a precious pet. They’re like guinea pigs to be disassembled by me on the first day I opened them from the box, and build them back. I never cared how expensive they were. All I only cared was the learning experience I could gain from disassembling them and building them back. Most of all, it’s cheaper to learn this technology by myself at home than learning this in a school here in US.
From 1997 to date, I’ve worked as consultant on projects in large corporations like IBM, Merck-Medco, Bear-Stearns, JP Morgan Chase, Oxford University Press, Royal Bank of Canada, New York City Board of Education, and currently Halcrow Yolles. Since then, I did not only learn building computers, but also connecting computers to the Internet, and even making money from the Internet, which I will discuss more in the coming blogs here. So, please always come and read my blogs here.
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