ON JANUARY 10, around 6 p.m., this writer and my companion were traveling along Dian Street in Makati. We were about to turn right to Buendia (now Gil Puyat Avenue) using some sort of a short service road fronting Mercury Drugstore when a passenger jeepney before us stopped to load and unload passengers.
Not intending to move despite repeated honking as the jeepney driver was waiting to fill his jeep with passengers, we were left with no other choice but to find an alternate route.
So we backed up and since the traffic light was a go for vehicles crossing Buendia straight to the other side of Dian St., we decided to turn right via Dian Street again.
To our surprise, two men who were wearing different uniforms – one was clad in grey while the other was in blue whose nameplate could not be seen since he was wearing a net vest over it- and who acted as traffic enforcers flagged us down, supposedly because we turned right instead of going straight.
I pointed to the jeepney that was blocking the only way to turn right.
They simply told us that we should have waited for the jeepney to take off. WTF!
The two ‘enforcers’ were practically telling us that we should have waited for the jeepney driver to finish doing the glaring violation being committed right under their noses.
It is annoying how these two can readily turn a blind eye to the violation of the jeepney driver and yet accost us for taking an alternative route owing to the obstruction caused by the said jeepney driver which, by the way, was a spit away from where the two comedic enforcers stood.
The two did not even bother to issue the jeepney driver a ticket or at least tell him to move.
Call me dirty-minded, but it makes me wonder about the apparently ‘selective’ policy of these enforcers.
Why ignore a violator driving a passenger jeep and flag down if the supposed violator drives a car?
When we pointed to the jeepney driver as the actual violator who should have been accosted instead of us, the two ‘enforcers’ let us go but not without ‘lecturing’ us. The nerve!!
This was when I reasoned out that no driver would exert effort to take an alternative route if they, as enforcers, did their job to not allow the only way for turning right to be blocked, moreso turned into a terminal by a passenger jeep.
Simply put, their being inutile was the root cause of everything.
Why turn a blind eye? How many ‘hundreds’ of reasons can there be?
The jeepney violator was right in front of them and yet they were ‘deadma.’
It made me wonder if jeepneys were allowed to block the way and leave private motorists no choice but to turn right to Buendia using Dian.
A colleague who covers Makati said that the one wearing gray would be from MAPSA or Makati Public Safety Department, while the one wearing blue could be a barangay enforcer.
I would have let it slide, but they dared us to write about it. They said they knew we were from the media based on the sticker on our dashboard.
How many have fallen victim to them?
It’s really hard to fathom and accept their reasoning that we should have waited for the jeepney driver-violator to finish doing his violation. Really?
What kind of ‘traffic enforcers’ are the MAPSA, Makati city government, or barangay authorities in Dian deploying? Who put them there? Are these the kind of people we expect to keep order in the streets of Makati City, supposedly the country’s financial district?
OMG!!!
Congratulations to Dr. Samuel Victor C. Tan, MD. A surgical oncologist holding clinic at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Taguig, he passed the Part II Certifying Oral Examination given last December 1, 2023, and will thus be conferred as Diplomate of the Philippine Board of Surgical Oncology during the induction ceremonies of SOSP 8th Annual Convention on July 12, 2024, at the Grand Hyatt Manila in BGC.
This was contained in a letter signed by Karl T. Morales, MD, FPCS, FSOSP, Secretary of the Philippine Board of Surgical Oncology, Inc. Board of Trustees and noted by Chairman Gerald T. Alcid, MD, MHPED, FPCS, FSOSP.
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