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| Photo by author. |
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I haven't seen anything like it, and we probably won't see it again. In all my years in college, I did not experience lining up for photocopies (we had lots of them at school, and you can avail of the xerox-now-come-back-later service).
Recently, a friend and I spent almost two hours in line for photocopying.
Two hours. We could have arrived in Hong Kong by that time.
The reason for this lining-up-at-the-blockbuster thing was a
program of GMA-7 program
Imbestigador with the National Statistics Office (NSO) offering to help people with problems in their official documents.
Seeing the ad some days back on Facebook convinced me and my friend that finally, after years of fruitless consultations at Manila City Hall and the NSO itself, we would be able to get her misspelled birth certificate right.
Knowing these mass events, the least we both expected was getting to speak with an expert who could give us authoritative advice on how to go about our predicament. We didn't really expect that our problems would be solved on the spot.
This, however, was what greeted us as we arrived:
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| The scene outside GMA Network drive. Photo by author. |
My friend and I bounced around from one gate of the GMA complex to another, trying to make sense of what was happening, and trying to hold on to a glimmer of hope that our coming to this place was not in vain.
Alas, that was not to be.
We did not see any
Imbestigador staff directing people where to go, only irate security people telling them to give them copies of their defective documents and go home.
We could not comprehend the sanity of this action. Most of us had left off a day of work and had come from considerable distances to seek help, in the hope that problems caused by inept registrars would be corrected.
In the end, we had no other choice but to line up at one of the stores in the area making a killing off photocopying services. It took us almost two hours to reach the photocopier, 15 minutes to get all our documents xeroxed (the machine was breaking down due to the workload), and another 10 minutes to get the documents ready, with a cover letter explaining my friend's predicament.
Instead of much-needed help, all we got was the vague assurance that
Imbestigador staff will wade through the mountain of requests and documents and personally call us with advice telling us how to live our lives because our parents did not get their spelling right.
To add insult to injury, there was this camera crew discreetly filming the crowd's agony and displeasure as we all stood in the hot sun, not knowing what to do and lamenting the fact that we could have spent the day in a more productive manner.
To be fair, GMA-7 and
Imbestigador probably did not anticipate this volume of people. They should, however, have taken time to at least meet the people to address the situation. There was no fearless "
hindi-kita-tatantanan" Mike Enriquez on the spot, at least while we were there; only impatient and largely "inconvenienced" guards who half-heartedly received our documents and pleas.
If anything, this shows us that the problem of misspelled documents is far bigger than anyone can imagine, and requires a more practical solution.
But until that happens, people in authority should not be toying with people's hopes and use a lot more common sense.
