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As you probably know by now we recently had a typhoon and it knocked us out of power for 10 days. The evening we came up, and the morning after, although we did have power, we did not have internet or phone service, at least not at our house. I went to the Globe office the morning of Dec 16th. I told them the problem and they said they would take care of it. I got home around 11:00 and approximately 25 minutes later the phone and internet were both working. Cool. It’s unusual for them to take care of things so swiftly, but I sure wasn’t complaining. Well this morning I get up and it’s the same thing. No internet and no phone. So I made another trip to Globe to bring the issue up … again. This story is about that trip and also why I go in person versus just calling them, or at least why I have been doing that. That ‘might’ be changing. This story will explain about that also.
So early afternoon of 17 Dec, around 12:45 pm, I go downtown with Lita. She is going by Chowkit to pick up some things and will be waiting there for me while I try to take care of the internet and phone issue. We ride with Saddam, as he is driving our tricycle today. He usually does on the weekdays and Victor on the weekends. We take Lita to Chowkit and then Saddam takes me to Globe. I told him that since I don’t know how long it will be, it’s best for him to just wait at Chowkit with Lita. It’s a good thing he did too. They were extra slow today. I got my number, #50, and it looked like they were on #46, but it turns out that some of the lights are out, and it’s #48. So finally they get around to calling #49. I suppose that since it was at lunch time, someone must have been out. There were only 2 people out at the desks and they sure didn’t look to be in a hurry.
The young lady working there was helping someone and it required that she call the main office in Manila. She went to one of the 2 phones on the wall to call, but I guess there was something wrong with the phone. She keep picking it up, trying to dial and then hanging up. She must have tried 7 or 8 times. Never once did she try the other phone behind her. The customer came up to her and she (the customer) tried the other phone, but it turns out it won’t work either. Finally the customer just calls the main office on her personal cell phone. The young man working there had, it seemed, an even stranger event going on. He was sitting there and the customer was on his computer typing. This went on for at least 15 or 20 minutes. Maybe there was a reason for it, but I’ve never seen that happen before. Most places don’t even like for you to touch their computers. The young man employee was talking with the young lady employee while she was trying to get Manila on the phone and his customer was typing on his computer.
Finally they get to #50, after about a half hour. I got the young man. I had 2 issues to bring up. The #1 issue was, of course, the internet and phone were not working … again. He got my land line number and made a report on the connection. It showed that they were having an issue in the area, so I suppose I was not the only one in Bagacay that could not get on the internet. He mentioned to me that any downtime would be deducted from my bill. That made me suspicious. They have never volunteered that information to me before. I should have asked, “Why are you expecting an extended outage”? The #2 issue I had with them was my cell phone. If you have been reading the blog, then you may remember an issue I had with putting in a P100 load, sending 7 texts messages and the load was gone. Well I wanted to find out why and stop that from happening again. To this day, over 4 ½ year of being here, I still do not understand the phone system here in Calbayog. I say Calbayog, and not the Philippines, because I’m told that the issues they have here are not nationwide. No clue why, but that’s a story for another time, if it’s true.
After he finally figures out what I’m trying to say, he shows me a graph on the front of the phone. I don’t remember what he called it, but it’s at the top of my Samsung S4, to the left (looking at it) of the battery percentage left. He said that when it has the arrows going in and out of that, it will eat up the minutes. I told him, “Well turn it off. I don’t know what it is and whatever it is, I don’t need it”. He did get it turned off and said that I should no longer have to worry about losing the minutes of any load I put in there. We will see. I was out of the Globe office pretty quickly once I got up to the desk.
I headed over to Chowkit and got the information for a story I want to write on it. (It’s one of the ones waiting for the internet to come back up). Saddam then proceeded to take us both home. Of course we had an issue on the way home, but that story will be in another post. After I got back home I was hoping to find that the internet and phone issues were taken care of already. Not so. In fact, when we returned from downtown, around 2:30 pm, we had another brownout. I don’t know how long it had been out, but no one else even knew it was a brownout. They were all sitting out front talking and never noticed a thing. The electric came back on around 3:30 pm, but the phone and internet status had not changed. It is now about 9:30 pm and it seems that the issue will not be resolved this evening. That is more of the type of service I expect from Globe, not that resolving problems in less than an hour stuff.
Now that I probably have the issue with my cell phone taken care of, maybe tomorrow I will use it to call the Globe office in Manila to inform them that I am still down. I think all maintenance calls go through Manila anyway. The problem I might run into calling from my cell phone though is I believe that even to call maintenance with their 3 digit maintenance number, which I forget at this time, you need to have a load. I think that is pretty odd also and just another reason why the phone system here is so confusing. I don’t know how low of a load you can purchase, but normally I don’t use this cell phone for anything except taking pictures and videos. Maybe I will just go back in person tomorrow. It will give me an excuse to take a video of the Chowkit area and maybe even of another Calbayog street. I am way overdue on getting another video done anyway. Businesses change quite often around here it seems, so I just might need to do Navarro St. again anyway. I probably won’t though. I’d rather get another, completely different street on video. That would give any viewers a more complete idea of what Calbayog Proper (downtown) looks like. Yeah, if it’s not raining tomorrow, I think I will do that. Get a few more pictures and take another video or two. I’ve got the time to do it, it’s just the ‘doing it’ part that I’m a bit slow on. Well see tomorrow.
Salamat Y’all
P.S. Jerry Cook has a website that he sells products on. Here is the link in case you want to check it out and maybe buy something from there: http://www.tripleclicks.com/
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Thanks for adding that link John.