I knew this is one uphill battle. Me vs a water concessionaire. I just finished filing my complaint and petition to review the concession agreement. ðŸ«
I don’t know if I would ever win. The odds are stacked against me: 1) politics; 2) no enabling laws or proper regulatory framework to govern LGU private-public partnerships; 3) they have resources while I don’t (lawyers).
Oh ok. I just received an email response from the GM of the GOCC involved in this concession. Positive response and I hope this is not a fluke.
I want to cry right now. ðŸ˜
I’m dead tired.
Why am I doing this? I don’t know.
To cheer me up a bit today. My Holbeins were delivered to me tgis afternoon.
That marine blue was punctured by my cat. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
So the whole day I was just bogged down by local water concerns. It has been the 5th day since water was out in my hometown. The service provider, LXXX, had the temerity to announce on their FB Page that they are on holiday that’s why their office is closed for the long weekend. My family has been scrounging for water sources FOR DAYS! So last night I contacted MPW, which is a 20+% shareholder, via my connections there.
Early morning I was told by MPW that my emails were already sent to the GM of LXXX and other partners in the consortium. The community relations of LXXX, that biatch, was combative and denied that their service is not shit. She demanded evidence. I just told her go look on your FB page and see the complaints since two years ago. She said those people are just emotional and she made it sound like this was a one-off thing. I said no, I lot of people had been complaining to me about the low water pressure and regular disrepair and that’s why many communities don’t have regular water service.
She said I will show you on Saturday evidence to dispute your claims are untrue. I shot back that I will gather evidence of your incompetence since you took over in 2016.
So I rallied people in my hometown to 1) screen cap all the complaints on LXXX FB page because they might erase it; 2) send their testimonies via email to me so I can compile and slap the CX officer’s face with it on Saturday; 3) file a formal complaint to LWUA and the local water district using the testimonies so LXXX could be penalized and 4) regulators could review the concession agreement and terminate it if LXXX is proven that it is not fulfilling its end of the concession agreement.
I told MPW that LXXX was so wrong in their approach with me. Why is the burden of proof with me?! They said they were sorry but they were only 20% stakeholders there and it was the majority owner, some mayor from Mindanao, who appointed the current GM. And guess what? The LXXX person who was combative towards me is the GM’s wife. WHICH IS TOTALLY WRONG! I told Metro Pacific that it’s nepotism, 2) this person should not handle community affairs because she has a personal stake because her husband is the GM. Metro Pacific told me that they were surprised, too, and they only learned about it this morning.
There are so many confidential info I got that I cannot blog about yet but I’ve got something on my sleeves on Saturday.
Let’s just say I have regulatory remedy on my side.
And I also told LXXX that I will present my evidence to MPW during their presscon next week and I will make sure that their chairman reads the compiled complaints against LXXX.
And of course I will tell them after Saturday that this will be filed with the regulators. I am a one-man team but OMG I will make sure heads will roll.
There are other details that I don’t have the energy yet to write here. I’M SO FUCKIN TIRED.
With my reporter friend who interviewed me this morning.
So yesterday was so exhausting. It took me several days before I finished my car registration with the Land Transportation Office, at its headquarters.
I spent x number of hours queuing at LTO Main but a lot of people got stuck there and some had been going back and forth there for days (just like me, albeit at a different LTO satellite branch), which ate up productivity. In some cases these people lost income for the day/s.
Why is it taking so long?
It’s because the IT system had been going down for days. The entire LTO system has been going offline—nationwide—for several days now.
Because of this, people that had been applying for their car registration are getting stranded. The process has been/is still crawling.
This is how chaotic the LTO office had been yesterday. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Some applicants had left after spending the entire day at the LTO but I refused to budge. I didn’t leave LTO until somebody attended to my application because DAMN IT, I’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR A WEEK NOW!
I was told that the inspection and stenciling of the serial number of my car had to be redone because it was done in another LTO office. I was like, “WTF!!! It’s not even my fault that LTO @20th Ave Cubao just packed up and left without warning to the public!”
I didn’t budge, I didn’t leave the premises until an inspector did the entire bullshit again. And I began tweeting the process, the issues, and the instances of people leaving their posts at 4 pm.
It was 4:01 pmand no one was around anymore to help us just because they couldn’t encode our papers because the “system was down”. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
One inspector said, he couldn’t do his job of doing the stenciling—his reason for being—because the people in the cubicle above didn’t say I can proceed. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! Those guys just didn’t want to do their work and left their posts!
I continued to tweet and tag the Twitter account of LTO central office about my very public ordeal.
Long story short, I finished it because I was adamant at pushing for my right as a citizen.
I was so frustrated with the entire thing that I posted a video monologue of my ordeal on Instagram.
So the next day, this reporter-friend messaged me on Viber about my tweets that were forwarded to her by some LTO people because they said whatever I tweeted were true.
We chatted and agreed that she will drop by and have the interview outside my apartment—along the avenue where we’re at. I was still in my sleepwear and my reporter-friend said that I should put on makeup because this will be an on-cam thing. HAHAHA, talk about pressure.
So to sum it up:
As I said in the interview with ABS-CBN, the problem is the entire system. It was a grave problem—the issue is about the service provider. Apparently STRADCOM is no longer the IT service provider for quite some time and shouldn’t even be there (but wait, STRADCOM still has a window there!) because they were already replaced by a German IT company. But LTO says they *couldn’t* turn over the database to the new IT provider, saying it was *difficult*. So this tug-of-war between the very old IT provider and the new, no non-sense Germans is causing outages in the IT system. Which affected the whole nation because the system outages are all over the Philippines. Every LTO branch is OFFLINE!
And to us reporters, we already know why.
Of course, I couldn’t say it outright that this is caused by corruption. The very inefficient STRADCOM leaves a lot of room for fixers and cash-related items that can fall through the cracks. The rank-and-file up to the high officials get their cuts from the fixers. This is also the reason why there are a lot of dumbass drivers on the road—even those who couldn’t drive can get registered or get their licenses because of fixers.
Once the German company takes a complete hold of the IT system, the entire LTO process will be efficient and accurate. NO room for grease money. Payment system can expand beyond the cashiers of LTO offices and they can tap other payment gateways like what SSS and other government agencies do. Imagine, they couldn’t even process credit card/debit card payments; everything has to be cash basis. If the German company has settled everything, the car registration and drivers license renewal can be done under an hour. No need for long lines, no need for fixers.
DAMN IT.
In the interview, I said this process shouldn’t even take a couple of hours and this shouldn’t even be done every year. In other countries, these are done every xxx number of years and only the old vehicles should inspected regularly for road worthiness. But everything should be done online.
UNFORTUNATELY, the LTO story did not air tonight. Probably it was bumped off by more time-sensitive and mass-oriented matters like the senate hearing on rice shortage/prices and the impending increase in rice prices. I understand that it is beyond the reporter’s control since I am also in the news business and I had been with a TV network too.
My desk and new keyboard before the keycap change yesterday. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Good thing I had some distraction because I was so angry. Because my newish mechanical keyboard is so tactile and cute, I was inspired to finish my job even though I was already boiling and ready to kill.
New keycaps arrived. Something that cheered me up yesterday. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
And today, I was on a Thursday chill mode to drive away the bad jujus of the previous day.
The latest Chromecast. Photo by CallMeCreayion.com
I chose to be happy while being reasonable. This thing is only PHP 2,800 and it transformed my decade-old TV into a smart TV with all the streaming apps you can install on that pebble-like thing you call Chromecast. I upgraded my second-generation Chromecast to this one instead of buying a new smart TV that costs PHP20,000, if I’m lucky. My LG TV still works perfectly fine and I have no reason to dump it. When we transfer to my new home, I will just mount the TV on the wall and dress it up like a picture frame and have artworks stream via this device (you can choose the kind of artworks you can display). I will have a gallery wall around the old TV so it won’t be obtrusive.
The old Chromecast will be given to my mom so she’s not limited to her laptop anymore when binge-watching Netflix. She has a TV that swivels so she can watch on her bed.
Ah tomorrow, we will be chasing a lot of executives in a hotel where a conference is now ongoing. Good luck to Friday driving madness.
