Deserving of praise

“When I do something good – nobody remembers. When I do something bad – nobody forgets.”

For the longest time many of the people I know inside the Land Transportation Office  (LTO) have felt that way especially because they have been unfairly crucified by the public for sins that were caused and committed by people like Mar Roxas, Jun Abaya and Alfonso Tan who centralized power and authority, came up with projects such as new car plates and license cards but failed miserably to deliver on their plan.

To make matters worse, they barely spent time on the front lines of the many LTO district offices and licensing centers where LTO employees were regularly shouted at or cursed by angry customers who could not get what they paid for – for years.

Under the leadership of Asec. Edgar Galvante things seem to be improving and the LTO front liners have shown their grit and determination to deliver what once was just a box of nightmares called plastic license cards. In spite of legal cases hurled at them, Galvante and his team pushed on to get the machinery and technology that will let them print honest to goodness plastic license cards. In the last two weeks the LTO-NCR group under Director Clarence Guinto has been issuing the new five-year driver’s license cards. After a few days of hiccups, LTO personnel have mastered their machines and have been issuing above the average production estimates.

That would have been enough but the LTO-NCR group also set their sights on issuing the same license cards to previous applicants that piled up to about a million over several months while the machines were being processed and delivered. Unknown to the public, LTO employees and officers have been working Saturdays and Sundays and have committed to do so for about six months in order to close out the backlog. Even the Employees Union backed the effort by way of formal declaration of support.

So far 39 district offices and licensing centers are on board and last Saturday, Sept. 9, they processed 3,365 applications, completed 3,416 with only 96 spoiled cards or 2.4 cards per unit/office. After all the BAD press the LTO has had in the past, I hope we can all be fair and kind enough to show our appreciation with a “tap on the back,” a positive post on Facebook, or simply tell the LTO people who work on their supposed days off, that their efforts are much appreciated.

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PS to the LTO; Please look into banning those HID or high intensity lights that have started to be installed on a number of new SUVs. People who have them on their vehicles think of the benefits to them but don’t realize that every time they use HID lights they actually blind several drivers ahead of them, causing them to be seriously distracted, slow down or even break. Some get furious and get even by intentionally slowing down or letting the vehicle pass and tailing them with their own headlights on bright.

I see this situation happen time and again especially on SLEX. If the tollway operators can’t ban them, perhaps it is time for the LTO to step in. Some of my friends argue that it is all just a matter of correct installation and angle. That applies to sedan or small cars but not to SUVs that are much taller than cars and their headlights pointing straight into the cabin of cars in front of them! Besides which you guys all know that in strong rains or thunderstorms your HID becomes useless because everything gets whitewashed with glare!

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It’s interesting what one discovers while spending weeks at a government hospital like the National Kidney Transplant Institute. For instance do you know that one life saving or life extending dialysis machine only costs as much as a Toyota Innova or about P1.2 million? One patient is cleansed” in four hours, meaning three persons can be cleansed on a normal day. Not everyone who undergoes dialysis is terminal and I know this after we helped a young boy who had been written off as terminal renal failure but went on to live a fruitful life after a year of tight guarding and regular dialysis.

If you hang around the parking lot of the NKTI you will surely hear the cocks crow! Yes some enterprising individual has somehow managed to put a a full pledged game fowl farm in between the NKTI and the Philippine Lung Center! What does he care about BIO SECURITY or possible risks to patients in critical care, right!

If you are a people person and watch people as a pastime you will surely pick-up on how a few days walking around the NKTI raises your EQ or compassion level. It is true what they say that in order to forget your troubles in life go out and look for someone who needs more help than you do. Finally, my hat off to the doctors, nurses, janitors, guards and most staff of the NKTI who were uniformly professional, caring and supportive. This is one reason why I always support, endorse and believe that government hospitals are a better choice in terms of expertise, cost and PR or People Relations.

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As I listen to the many attacks and threats hurled at the Commission on Human Rights, it occurred to me that one major “failure” if I may call it that, is the CHR failed to promote, communicate, or talk about their accomplishments that were beneficial to taxpayers and ordinary citizens. I am neutral toward the CHR primarily because it is hard to defend or criticize an agency that we know very little about. Time to communicate properly.

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