Amusing Independence Day

Three amusing things happened or were noticed on and the day before Independence Day. One. In his homily at the Redemptorist Church a few years ago, a priest recalled that once as a young boy, he asked his mother why they could not sit in the front pew of their parish church even if it was empty. Because that’s for the town’s important people, his mother explained to him.

Some people may not have been able to listen to that very moving sharing of the reverend’s experience or if they had, failed to appreciate his plea to heed Jesus Christ’s call for humility. The front pews of the same Redemptorist church are now pasted with the warning that they are reserved for lay ministers only.

Two. We have a Distracted Driving Law, which will be enforced soon after the issuance of a supposedly more coherent implementing rules and regulations. That means goodbye to mobile phone use while driving.

Yesterday morning, as we were preparing to turn left from Osmena Blvd. across Cebu Doctors Hospital, I noticed that the Capitol Site barangay traffic aide appeared to be reading something (we were behind his back), glancing only occasionally at oncoming vehicles while directing traffic. True enough, when we passed by him, he was holding a red cell phone in front of him.

There ought to be a law against Distracted Traffic Enforcing.

Three. A few minutes before midnight Sunday, darkness fell in our neighborhood. Veco will be able to handle this in due time, I told myself. They have people for this sort of thing.

But the lights were still out when I woke up at 3 a.m. so I decided to call the Veco hotline. A sleepy voice took the call and after asking me to wait, told me the “emergency crew” was aware of the problem and they’ll fix it at 8 a.m. because that was when their bodega in Banilad would open and they could get the spare parts.

I called three more times, all in the morning: at 7:30 when I was given the same assurance, at 8:30 when I was told that the repairmen were in Banilad to get the spare parts, and finally at 9:45. The last conversation (with a call center agent, most probably, she said her name was Lea Padilla) was the most amusing. After I complained that the answer that she gave me was the same one I have already heard (the repairmen were in Banilad to get the spare parts), she told me not to worry because there were many of us who were similarly inconvenienced by the brownout.

Dear friend Anton Perdices, I know that service excellence is a, if not the, mantra in your company but by way of process improvement, maybe you should consider replacing your call service provider or at least compel them to train their agents to show more empathy with distraught customers?