Before October ended – no sleep and disenfranchised

TYPHOON “SANTI” (international name: Mirinae) kept me up and about from the evening of October 30^th well into the following day.  Everybody at home was surprisingly sound asleep.  I was the only one up and about – I even cooked, remember? – and as I had told Friendship, Spider-man and Batman through text, I thought the pummeling winds were going to peel off our roof.  It sounded that bad outside.  I even took a video of one of our trees.

I didn’t get to sleep anymore as when morning came, it was a series of crisis meetings already at work.  (I manage an engineering team at a company that keeps 24/7 operations.)  I don’t go to the office on Saturdays but yesterday morning, the first of a series of meetings was called at 6:00 AM.  I had to dial in.

After everything had been checked and put into order – the safety and security of our people being foremost – I hit the shower and thought that I still had time to get myself registered to vote in the 2010 elections.  The coming elections is truly an exciting one – a chance to effect change in the government in our nation’s first fully automated polls.

If the Daphne Oseña Paez knew me, she would be telling me, “eNTeNG, you should’ve done it earlier.”  And after my horrific experience, she could very well be singing “I told you so” to me – complete with a dance.

I arrived at the registration center after lunch time.  Instead of receiving a good explanation as to why they had already stopped handing out application forms at 12:00 NN, I, together with so many others, received a good dressing down from someone who seemed to be the head.  With a face made up for Halloween, she lambasted at us saying that they didn’t have the computers to finish taking biometrics, they could only entertain 500 people for the day, and that they blamed us for waiting for the deadline to work on our registration.  When someone mentioned that the news announced that registration had been extended to 12:00 MN on the last day, Halloween face told him to go there instead.  I laughed – she was despicable and crass but she was hilarious.

But the last straw was when she started to incite a riot – mob rule? – calling all the other “500” lucky registrants to “defend themselves” and tell off the latecomers like myself.  At that point I had to turn around and leave.  I fixed myself up so perfectly for that one photo shoot for my voter’s ID.  I wouldn’t be caught in the middle of a rumble.

Besides, I had spent too much time listening to the rants of someone who only had a makeshift seal of the Comission on Elections – haphazardly nailed on the wall – to speak for her power.

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