Before Christina Moran became the top performer at Horizon Online, she was just another hopeful recruit in the Nesting Period—that magical time when fresh hires are thrown into live calls with zero experience and 100% anxiety.
It was like being asked to swim across Manila Bay with a headset and a script written by someone who clearly hated customers.
"Ma'am, I understand your frustration," Christina said to her first caller, a woman from Texas who believed her router was possessed. "But have you tried turning it off and on again?"
The woman screamed. Christina muted the call and whispered to her seatmate, "Is it normal for them to yell like they're auditioning for The Exorcist?"
Her seatmate, a muscular guy with a buzz cut and a smile that looked like it had survived three heartbreaks, nodded. "Totally normal. First week is like Squid Game, but with less prize money."
His name was Jacob. He had the body of a gym rat and the brain of a motivational poster. He wasn't smart in the traditional sense, but he had a talent for surviving chaos. He once calmed down a customer by singing Bakit Ngayon Ka Lang in falsetto.
Christina liked him immediately.
The nesting floor was a battlefield. Agents cried in the pantry. Trainers pretended not to notice. One girl quit after her third call and left her headset as a symbolic offering to the gods of burnout.
But Christina endured.
She learned the sacred art of pretending to care. She mastered the fake laugh. She even developed a signature cough that made her sound just sick enough to avoid extra tasks, but not sick enough to be sent home.
Her inverted nose became a legend.
"Is it true she can smell lies?" whispered one agent.
"I heard she was born during Mercury retrograde," said another.
One guy from QA tried to flirt with her by saying, "Your nose is like a compass. It always points north."
She responded by sneezing on his keyboard.
Despite the chaos, Christina rose through the ranks. Her metrics were flawless. Her customer satisfaction scores were higher than the CEO's cholesterol. She became the poster girl for resilience.
But behind the scenes, she was struggling.
Her salary was delayed—again. Her mom's medicine was running out. And her Operations Manager had started giving her that look—the one that said, "I'm your boss, but I also think I'm your destiny."
Christina knew the jungle well. She knew how to survive.
But she also knew something else:
She wasn't going to stay silent forever.