Licensed to wait
ONE hour, more or less, was how long it took me to renew my driver’s license at Robinsons Galleria in Pasig last week. What’s one hour if I’ll have to wait and “please follow up after six months”?
What they issued was an official receipt stamped “valid as temporary until card type release,” courtesy of the Land Transportation Office. Not all the wailing and ailing of the public has moved the problem of a backlog of two years and two administrations by an inch, but so what? In this country, everyone queues up sooner or later at one time or another for one cause or another.
Like the l-o-n-g line of applicants for NBI clearance near the LTO window. At least the mall was airconditioned and there were no visible signs of fixers. The applicants were well-behaved, if only to prove that they were not acting like potential criminals. Looking at them, so many and no one a step closer to the door, I was grateful that the LTO shop had at least plastic chairs for its paying customers. The LTO staff under Vincent Vergara, a smiling face if I ever saw one, were cordial in spite of the wear and tear on their smiles at 11 in the morning, after they must have processed a bundle of applicants – medical and eye tests, filling up forms, picture-taking, accepting payment (11,002 per).
Which reminded me of another long and unmoving line, this one of buses, jeepneys, taxis, UV Express vans and SUVs, parked on both sides of East Ave., QC, no thanks to LTO’s sister agency, LTFRB. Motorists and passengers complain that if LTFRB can create its own traffic jam on its own turf with its unmoving parade of “colorum” vehicles, why don’t they just pack up and go away to Tarlac, where tons and tons of vehicles with fake plates or no plates, fake franchises and other fakery are impounded, waiting for someone to wave a wand and make them disappear into the ground.
*** My apologies to CHED Chairman Patricia B. Licuanan for misnaming her Virginia, which was the name of her mother, the writer Virginia Benitez Licuanan, in this space last May 20. To err is human, to forget not so divine.