Medium Rare

For all our avowed love for and life-and-death attachment to our cellphones, what was so hard about meeting the SIM registration period of 180 days? As usual, the powers-that-be gave in to the clamor for an extension, so now we have 90 more days to obey a law that takes but minutes to fulfil. But why shouldn’t government cave in, when government finds it all but impossible to meet its own deadlines? For example, how many of us are still waiting for our national ID, 18 months after applying for it?  The luckier or not-so-lucky ones who have received theirs got nothing more than a cheap piece of paper, not the plastic cards they were expecting. As of this writing, 1.3 mil-lion license plates for four-wheel vehicles and motorcycles are still stuck in the pipeline, waiting to roll out of the factory just because the supplier has run out of plates. For a long time, passports by the tens of thousands could not be released for the simple reason that the printing couldn’t catch up with the issuing. “Tawad,” or haggling, in the national language, is nothing more or less than a habit. To make ta-wad and seal the bargain, so to speak, represents a small victory for seller and buyer, who may or may not be aware that the act of haggling is a time-honored ritual that does not have to actually, factually result in a discount. In another sense, we make tawad by pleading for an extension of a deadline. This habit has be-come so ingrained it’s attained the status of a national pastime. To tweak the old joke about “plane always late,” it’s people who are always late. To be late is to refuse to be punctual. President Cory Aquino tried to set an example for punctuality when she was in office, though she never said if the results were satisfactory. As far as experience goes, performances at the Cultural Center of the Philippines always, always started on time, on the dot. (Ironically, President Cory never once stepped into the theater.) When Erap became president, the biggest favor he bestowed on weekend-loving Filipinos was to suspend the number coding for cars on Saturdays. In my book, the best tawad from Malacañang.