UNMEASURABLE

(Read Satanhigh Chapter 5 first before reading this entry, click the cover on the left to do so)

I originally made the 6th issue of Satanhigh in 2008, a good two years after I made the 5th issue. I

graduated in college back in 2007 and when you enrol as a fine arts student, it's either you apply for your masters and get a job as a professor teaching art in the university or get a job and just paint and grow old like that. If you're like me, I had to settle for a job not art related, I had to work at a telemarketing gig or a call center agency so that I could have a job where my long hair wasn't a problem for them. Anyway, I lasted for two years at my call center job, and I was doing outbound calls, in the sales department. If you don't know what that means, it means call center hell my friend. Outbound calls means you call people at random from a call list without them expecting you to call them, that's actually the easy part, because you can talk to anyone at random and you can test your conversation skills if they'd hang up on you.

The hard part was the sales part, imagine if you were relaxing or sleeping and out of the blue someone calls you and tried to sell you something that you already have, like another phone line, the same one you're talking in but in a different account, hence a different bill. No way right? The best answer to that is to hang up the phone. But that's why we call every day to sell you a new line with a new bill attached to it for two years!  Sometimes we even call back even after the client already said no because our company believed that everyone can be sold anything even if they refused already, it just depends on the sales person. That's why people who sold more than the average dude had bonuses. I don't know what the hell those top sellers were telling their customers, but they sure got rich that way. We had a quota on us so that we'd really push for a sale so we had to make 3 sales a day. And those who didn't meet the quota got the axe.

So typically some of us would push customers to get a new line even if they really don't need an extra line because we had a quota (or bonus for some). Some folks we call are lured when we mention that if they do get a new line there's a free phone that comes along with it. What they don't realize is that their bills would double after that month because they now have two lines and they're stuck with it with a new contract for two more years. Just thinking about those days makes me cringe. It's like your fucking people over the phone so that you could feed your family, it really wasn't for me. I may have created Satanhigh but I'm not THAT evil. 

You could say Satanhigh is somewhat a medium where I could tell the evil that I see around me. Those things no one notices or talks about. It was a different kind of hell alright, that's why the account I was in was terminated after a few years and we had to shift to another account. When they told us that I saw it as an opening to quit and I did. I was artistically drained working there, sure I had all the money in the world to spend when my salary came but man oh man, my artworks only suffered. It was because I had no time for myself, when one paints you really can't quantify how many hours you will make a masterpiece.

No one can determine that, and so as an artist, I need my undisturbed time to paint all day, all night and even all week, but if you put me in a 9-5 job, my artistic side suffers because the environment I'm in is totally the opposite of art. It's technical and corporate, it's all sales and robotic, the bosses the people even some of my friends there were like zombies to say the least because we're literary like slaves. No one wanted to be there, but they are because it pays good. We need the money fine, but man, as an artist, it's like selling your soul, because you can't paint when you want to paint. I was only able to survive there because I was drawing on my sketchpad when I was making calls. I was only able to make one issue of Satanhigh, instead of putting all my energies into doing what I love doing regardless if I get paid or not. Sure I have all the money to buy art materials, but in exchange for that was my time selling something that I don't believe in. Rather than waste my life for a corporate company trying to make them rich, I'd rather fail in making comics. At least if I die, I have no regrets.

Marius Black, Manila 7/26/2016