An Open Letter to Globe Telecom
Dear Globe,
This is a profile of your average prepaid user. It would benefit you to read it.
I’ve had my prepaid number for about 10 years now. I do not have disposable income. I cannot apply for a postpaid line because I cannot promise to abide by its lock-in period, and my usage fluctuates according to use. Also, I cannot risk paying more than I sign up for.
So, for the purpose of additional work: just a little job for a little extra contacts and some money to keep me and my sister afloat, I needed to make calls. I wanted to sign up for Globe Duo. I was dangerously in my last 3 digits of my expense account, but those calls needed to be made. I forked over an equivalent to P400 worth of credits for the sole purpose of using your services.
I am told, though I’ve followed each keyword and number to a tee, that I have inputted the wrong keyword. I call up the call center service and a perky recording advises me that the service may not be availed because of the hundreds of thousands of people trying to avail it at the same time.
It has been 4 hours, and innumerable attempts to availing of this service to save me money. I still get an error message.
I am forced to make my calls at normal rates, which will use up even more money. More money I don’t have.
Thanks to you, I am down to a ridiculous sum in the bank that I have to magically stretch till payday. I invested in you as a service and you didn’t deliver.
Educated and fairly brought up as I am, I think in light of this foul, foul service, I have earned the right to say: you little shits.
What the Facts Say: A Sampling of Online Advocacy Behavior
What one ‘likes’ or ‘heart’ on tumblr reveals a lot about a person.
Some loose observations based on ‘Face the Facts‘ likes and trends:
-It is true: it helps to have a major blogger or figure vouch for your blog. The surge in popularity of Face the Facts would not be possible without the help of Carlos Celdran, who very kindly retweeted the url.
-A good chunk of its initial followers are Filipino teens, about as young as 15 or 16 years old. They tend to like or reblog the sex myths. Before parents freak out at how young they are, I think it’s a telling sign on what parents and even schools should be telling their kids. Be glad that the kids found the blog, imagine if they ended up in an unmoderated chatroom instead.
-A sad fact I was forced to face: the greater disasters will not be reblogged. A post on a local maternity hospital where it’s 3 patients to a bed went largely ignored, while a post on the poor talking about the RH bill ends up on tumblr radar. The post on RH Bill not being passed this year got as few as 3 hearts and only 1 reblog. This is a more interesting finding: generalizations have some kind of impact. It’s fine if you’re talking about the poor, but it’s another entirely if you have details on how it directly affects them. One is easier to digest than the other. Consider this article which touches on the point: What motivates people to give to charity by the authors of ‘Freakonomics’.
As for the dead reaction on the RH Bill dying – I wonder if it’s largely due to that newsbit overshadowed by the fuss on Gloria Arroyo’s medical treatment. Or have we simply given up?
What do you think?
Art as Conversation
My approach to art is to see if it works as a whole. I wasn’t wowed by Mideo Cruz’s “Poleteismo”, but I get it. If the only thing we see is a condom and a dildo over pictures of Jesus and Mary, then the criticism fails.
I overheard a colleague criticize Mideo Cruz’s work as being too controversial, because, “If this were a Middle Eastern country he’d be dead.” Yes, but then the rest of the world goes on to call them barbaric.
“Poleteismo” was shocking, but I wouldn’t say controversial because it is a slice of the real world. I thought what made it more disturbing for other people was the placement of pop culture posters right next to religious imagery. For those who thought it tasteless, I say they haven’t been inside a typical poorhouse where it’s not weird to see FHM posters are put up next to the Last Supper. It’s not about being sacrilegious to them. It’s just decor, it’s their aesthetic. Agree or disagree with it, it’s their concept of “maganda”.
As the debate on reproductive health rages on in the country: Do we also continue to deny that religion, Catholicism in particular, continues to meddle with what should be state issue of reproductive health? Review your facts. The symbolism of “Poleteismo” isn’t even that much of a stretch.
In the time I’ve spent with the arts, I have not seen any government or church body support or uphold a standard for art and aesthetic. I have seen a lot more toned down, even outright banned.
This is what agitates me most about the Mideo Cruz fiasco: why are we so concerned about what shouldn’t be seen, when we haven’t set the foundations for good, local art?
Recommended viewing: “Hamlet 2” by Andrew Fleming.
“It was stupid!” “Yes it was stupid, but it was also theater.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giBWNkRta5o]
Of catfood and songs
The Catfood Fiasco
[Read on the Rafa Santos catfood fiasco here]
Thing is: that isn’t the first time I heard the catfood analogy to theater pay. I’ve heard it before, from someone else in rehearsal room banter. That’s really what makes the difference: there are jokes you tell your friends, then there are the ones you don’t print or show.
Remember, remember, Joan Rivers and the eat your dog joke. It’s equivalent to the N word: fine and fun among friends, but it’s a media grenade onscreen.
While I’ve accepted his apology, and I do hope all the best for Rafa Santos, I also hope the community considers the repercussions of the statement. It takes guts to wade through the theater and freelance creative industry, especially one in a developing country. So far, I’m amazed that we continue to churn out talent and shows. We’re only as good as the gigs we get, and we’re very thinly protected by the labor laws.
For the most part, it’s a wild, wild, world out there. What I wish is that it gets us thinking of a standard for all engagements and companies to follow. We have the passion, we just need the regulations to allow us keep working at it.
Off into the world we go
Speaking of regulations, from what I know from working the trenches of the stage, I can take a guess as to why they imported a cast for the Songs of Andrew Lloyd concert. Abby wrote about the concert here, which also sums up my sentiments.
So, why the import? Let’s just say that just say that some companies didn’t abide by the fine print way back when, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.
It’s a pity though, I remember before Miss Saigon got staged in Manila they’d frequently stage even grander revues with Philippine talent.
I enjoyed the show, but I firmly believe Pinoys could have done it better. I’m also slightly miffed that they got bigger showbuyers for it when they could have gotten a full show of equivalent, if not better caliber, for a competitive price.
Call me naive, but for all our accomplishments in the theater scene, I daresay we can market ourselves. It just needs the right push, and I haven’t seen that push in a long while.
Why Face the Facts?
Simple: cause almost everyone missed the point.
I’m glad that the church is challenged, I’m glad that there are people standing firm and saying that we are not the Friar state we used to be. But it really isn’t about that.
It is about the women and children who die at birth, who didn’t know the what and how to take care of themselves.
It is for an entire generation of women that were haunted by the trauma of their prom night, because they simply didn’t know any better.
It is about each scared high school girl who seriously believed that she could have an abortion by taking aspirin with coca-cola.
It’s about each teenage boy who couldn’t really understand what was happening to them, or comprehend the consequences of following what they felt.
For the parents who don’t know how to talk to their kids. For the kids who dared to ask, only to be punished.
For those who learned elsewhere but got lost in the fiction: in the magazines, the internet, urban legends, their adventurous friends.
The ones who learned in regret, in retrospect.
For lack of facts, we work with fiction and heresay.
These are the fictions that they believed in. Read it and weep.
With sexuality, ignorance is not bliss.
Add food for thought: we could get the right information out at zero cost.
Three little words: Face the facts. We need RH Bill 5043. We need to know.
Or face this fact: people will die from not knowing.