My first job in Italy: live or die

Hello everyone! I hope you're still very well, you must have asked yourselves why I have been silent for almost a month at a time when really I should be publishing something everyday, today I am going to a sort of catharsis about what I have been experiencing during my last few weeks here.

Everything seemed rosy but...

As every person who is on holidays and wants to keep gaining experience, I can tell you that I was looking for a job in Rimini finally after around almost two weeks of searching I was able to find a job as a receptionist in a three star hotel, this time not from Rimini but from Riccione which is about 30 minutes from Rimini by bike.

My experience in a Riccione family hotel :S

Riccione, like Rimini, is part of this Romagnolo coast characterised by being a cradle for fun and for different Italian families that arrive during these European summer periods, okay so I started working in a hotel dedicated to family and kids, for reasons of caution and respect I'm not going to tell you the name but I am going to tell you that the owners are are a married couple of over 60 years old which each boasted as an emblem for having a lot of experience in this area and having a large portfolio of customers who come to their business generation after generation.

I am not inexperienced!

I can tell you that in the hotel sector I am not in any way inexperienced, I already have a couple of strands that I have accumulated through my experiences in my beloved Peru and a stint in USA as a housekeeper, this means that nobody can fool me about how to clean a hotel bedroom given that I have learned a lot from people who have been teaching me in an uninterested manner each of their acquired knowledge so that I can also transfer that, in short, today I don't want to talk about my professional past but rather this recent one which I had to endure.

I propose

When I had my interview with who I would be my future bosses, we agreed that I was going to have 6 eight-hour working days and one day off with a salary of 1000 euro, in the end this agreement was never fulfilled since the other receptionist who was a girl who was barely 16 quit under the order of her mum and I had to carry on doing twelve hour shifts every day and I even had thirteen hours one day.

How many times putting up with labour injustice

You can certainly imagine that I didn't have time for myself, they were rather stressful days, I don't mean the work but the disposition of those who were my bosses, I didn't really feel as comfortable as I expected to be so I finally decided to present my resignation and that I had to do more than three times. .

You will wonder why I am telling you this, well, I don't want the same thing to happen to you as what happened to me and that they get you as a "lorna" as we say in Peru when people want to take advantage of others.

After having several meetings trying to bring peace to the party, I can tell you that they made me another proposal, work alone 7.5 hours a day without a day-off until August and receive a salary of 1100 euro. What would you have done? You would have accepted, really it wasn't that bad, for a moment I thought about it and said 'Why not?'. In life I'm used to giving many opportunities and also giving myself opportunities as I am not perfect, there's a reason I like to call myself "strangely imperfect" (only for connoisseurs).

No to labour injustice!

There is something that I cannot tolerate, and that is called injustice, exploitation and my bosses were quite but quite temperamental, not with me but with the rest of them at work with the person who did the cleaning, with those who cooked in the hotel, with those who served in the restaurant I was a spectator of everything that happened and they also say that whoever gives is rewarded, I could not tolerate this labour mistreatment so I armed myself with energy or whatever you want to call it and I presented my insatiable and irrevocable resignation.

Time to make peace

I got the impression that my boss realised that she was losing a good human capital, I felt a few words in her eyes that were telling me "sorry" I have a degree of sensitivity which allows me to sometimes write like crazy but I told myself that I hope you have learned your lesson.

Never allow anyone to raise their voice at you neither in life nor at work, a person's serenity is worth much more than any money or experience, that was what I was able to salvage from this first work experience in Italy.

In spite of everything, I am able to say that I can salvage some things like, for example, the chef who made some marvellous dishes and I ate them in silence accompanied with my cleaning partners, there is also something that I want to give as a kind of tribute and that is to all those mothers who take out the grime to bring bread to the table for their children, I insatiably admire every one of those women who put up with everything in order to bring relief to their family.

Last day at work

On my last day, one of the cleaning ladies when she found out I was leaving asked me why I was leaving? I told her that I couldn't bear this work environment and that I preferred to be at peace at home, in a matter of seconds she started crying and an enormous feeling of guilt came upon me as if I had been the cause of her lamenting, she spoke to me about her children and that she always did it thinking about them, that I forgive people and that I go on with my life in peace.

I am not going to forget these words and I told the lady that she continues to have courage, that she continues to have strength which typifies her in order to keep hanging on that there is not too long of the Summer season to end, sometimes I wonder if it is money that drives people? What would our lives be like if this didn't exist. There is no doubt that labour exploitation totally exists here in Italy as it also exists in my country, for a moment I thought that I had paid my "right of way" many years ago but I was realising that it wasn't like that at all and that life is always going to give you these whips but that indeed, none of those that come are going to be the same as the last one, what doesn't destroy us makes us stronger.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger!

I don't know if perhaps some day you can go through work experiences which, in truth, as I said to the lady before I left, are life experiences which leave a mark on you. I was working here only a month and today I already feel that I have returned to life, and that there are many, many people in the world who may be going through the same as me, let's not give up, I firmly believe that one of the best tools to break this chain of bad experiences is to be entrepreneurs and if some day we are supervisors, realise that in front of us there aren't human machines, they are people who feel, who have feelings and have loads of value and dignity. Remember that!

My last day at my job in Riccione there was a hellish wind with rain included, however this wasn't a hindrance for me to continue cycling against the wind to return home and somehow, in spite of everything, to be able to salvage what I had learned and to thank life for making stronger and stronger.

See you some other time! And thank you for reading, I hope that this catharsis has been able to help you in some way as it left a mark on me. Take care of yourselves

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