But for Archbishop Oscar Cruz, nobody seems to give a damn anymore about the operation of the illegal numbers game jueteng, which remains to be very much alive and kicking in Pangasinan. Even those who were traditionally noisy against it in the past cannot be heard anymore. Has everybody given up the fight and conceded that jueteng cannot be eradicated in this lifetime?
Really, there is a deafening silence. We still have to hear a mayor announce his or her initiative to stop it. And we still have to hear the police taking bolder steps to run after jueteng lords.
What continues to amaze us, especially in the province, is that the police have not changed its dialogue everytime it is confronted with this issue. You will hear the same lines: “It’s a guerilla- type operation; draws are held inside moving vans or in provincial tri-boundaries; we don’t have enough personnel; the people are patronizing it,” etcetera, etcetera.
As we have always pointed out in the past, if jueteng thrives in a community, it because local government officials allow it. Some of these officials have even publicly admitted that their shares from jueteng go to their social obligations, also known as KBL – kasal, binyag, libing.
Well… The Archbishop was very correct in describing jueteng as a “corrupt and corrupting illegal activity. “It is a slimy syndicate whose ‘god’ is money, whose real name is ‘corruption,’ whose mere strength is the apathy of millions of people of goodwill.”
Amen.
*****
About two Mondays ago, officials of the Dagupan Electric Corporation were invited to the Sangguniang Panlungsod session hall to shed light on the frequent brownouts that the city experienced last June.
Through a Power Point presentation, Engr. Augusto Sarmiento, Decorp operations manager, patiently enumerated the situations when Decorp has to cut off power or has to “isolate an area.” These situations include natural calamities, such as floods, typhoons, etc. Sarmiento said that by cutting off power in affected areas, accidents are avoided and consumers are protected.
Somebody later asked him why is it that during power failures, Decorp telephone lines are difficult to contact. I even thought at that time that these phones are deliberately left unanswered or hung up for Decorp personnel to avoid angry and complaining callers during these situations.
Sarmiento explained that they have personnel to answer those phone calls. Callers get busy tones because other callers may already be talking to their personnel or they have dialed at the same time with other consumers. Decorp has about 59,000 households as clients in Dagupan City, Calasiao, San Fabian, and other towns.
“If a hundred of these clients dial at the same time, it will really be difficult for them to get through,” Sarmiento said.
Just an unsolicited but friendly advice: With the advancement in communication technology, Decorp should now consider establishing text messaging lines, so that the public may be able to easily report to them not only the outages in their respective areas, but also potential dangers, such as dangling live wires, collapsed electric posts, etc.
Aside from this, Decorp should also consider installing an incoming call cueing system and friendly voice recordings in their telephones that would inform a caller that a customer representative would attend to him or her soon. This way, customers would know that the lines are open and would not have to speculate anymore.
Finally, it would also help Decorp if everytime there is an outage, scheduled or unscheduled and even on a very limited scale, one of their personnel would call every radio station in the city to explain on-air what happened and announce regular updates afterwards. This way you will have a wider reach and maybe, just maybe, you will also be able to substantially reduce the number of angry and complaining callers to your office.
ENDNOTES: Congratulations to the Lyceum Northwestern University for being an awardee of the Consumers Union of the Philippines. LNU president Gonz Duque was in South Korea when the award was given… Belated happy birthday to Mr. Roland Hidalgo, hard-hitting commentator of DWPR Aksyon Radyo. Mr. Hidalgo celebrated his birthday last Saturday.
QUOTE: Let yourself be open and life will be easier. A spoon of salt in a glass of water makes the water undrinkable. A spoon of salt in a lake is almost unnoticed. -- Buddha
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