Manila, Philippines, PLDT

Why Is Customer Service So Fucking Bad In the Philippines? #pldt #globe

| Spike

(I’m back in Hong Kong now … but for how long? There may be a light at the end of my tunnel. At the moment it’s flickering way off in the distance, but it’s better than total darkness.)

The Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry is one of the largest employers in the Philippines. It makes sense. On the one hand, a large segment of the country speaks fluent English and there’s a good education system here (for those who can afford it). On the other hand, salaries and office rentals are low compared to many other countries. So the BPO industry flourishes here, covering everything from call centers and help desks to IT development and support and probably all sorts of other areas I’m not aware of.

These companies get massive foreign contracts. When they sign a new client, they often need so many people that they’ll advertise on billboards. When I was working in Ortigas, every day I’d see people with clipboards standing in the street offering BPO jobs to people passing by.

This model wouldn’t work if the companies couldn’t deliver up to a certain expected standard. So obviously it does work. And yet, most local companies seem to totally fail in terms of customer service.

PLDT

Let’s start with the major telecom company, PLDT. They’re the ones with the monopoly on landlines, they own one of the two largest mobile companies (Smart), they’re a major ISP.

(“We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.” Lily Tomlin)

Continue reading “Why Is Customer Service So Fucking Bad In the Philippines? #pldt #globe” →

SpikeLife

Farewell 2019 - You Fucked Me Into A Cocked Hat

| Spike

(A message to myself for 2020.)

2019 fucking destroyed me. I’ve been sitting here for the past week thinking about if and how I can recover in 2020.

At the start of 2019 I was living and working in Manila. Thanks to taxes in the Philippines, my net salary was about 40% less than what I made at my previous job. We could make ends meet but we weren’t getting ahead. At the very least, I enjoyed the work and had a great relationship with my boss … until the company decided upon a re-org that left me reporting to a person who was not qualified to be managing technology people.

And then, to make things worse, I found out about the mandatory retirement law in the Philippines. It turns out that everyone (with very few exceptions) has to retire on their 65th birthday.

Continue reading “Farewell 2019 - You Fucked Me Into A Cocked Hat” →

Food, Manila, Philippines, Restaurants, SpikeLife

A Pretty Good Day in Manila

| Spike

I’m working on an extended post to explain my current situation. I’ll finish that soon. In the meantime, to not be all doom and gloom, I had a pretty good day today, a day that reminds me of some of the positives about being in Manila and few of the negatives.

Monday, two days before Christmas, traffic was horrendous everywhere. I went out with a friend and once we finished the stuff we set out to do, it took us about 3 hours to get home - 1 hour of trying to get a Grab car with no success at which point my friend called his wife and asked her to come and pick us up, then 1 hour for her to get to us, and not quite an hour to travel the 6 or 7 kilometers back home. That’s one side of things. Today was a lot better.

Continue reading “A Pretty Good Day in Manila” →

SpikeLife

Back In Manila

| Spike

I’ve just arrived in Manila, where I’ll be spending the next two weeks mostly chilling out at home and trying to think about what comes next. At the moment the odds are strong that I will be packing up our place in HK at the end of January. Thanks for your supportive messages following my last post; at some point I’ll figure out what if anything I want to say about what’s currently going on.

Big plans for the next two weeks - catch up with a few friends, maybe see the Star Wars movie, try to grab meals from 3 restaurants here I miss (El Chupacabra, Holy Smoke, Vatos - the wife wants a return visit to Denny’s), and hide in my room on New Year’s Eve when my wife has her entire family and very possibly the rest of the damned country come over and eat spaghetti in sweet sauce with the little hot dogs and karaoke until they drop.

Meanwhile, some differences noted, most of them fucking obvious:

Hong Kong - can walk to 2 supermarkets and a couple hundred bars and restaurants; Manila - can’t walk fucking anywhere and I don’t have a car here any more.

Hong Kong - 1 Gbps internet for US$23 a month; Manila - actually I can’t recall what speed I’m subscribed to, speedtest reports 55 Mbps just now and I’m paying US$70 a month. Gonna get the fuck off PLDT and switch to Globe or Converge if I can get it done while I’m here.

Hong Kong - 40 inch TV; Manila 55 inch TV, which is helpful, since I won’t be going out much.

Hong Kong - I just paid US$10 for a double barbecue bacon cheeseburger meal at Burger King; Manila - the same will cost me about $3. (On Friday night in HK we went to Mother of Pizzas and had a pepperoni pizza and a bowl of linguini with Italian sausages in a pinot grigio cream sauce and that cost just above US$50, far more than we’d normally spend for a meal for 2 but it was our last night in HK before the holiday break. Here I’m sure I can find the same at relatively similar quality for $30 or less.

What am I trying to say? Not a clue.

Here’s a new 14 minute video Lana Del Rey just released, from her Norman Fucking Rockwell album, which I still play a fuckload.

Can’t wait to watch Eddie Murphy’s return to SNL Sunday afternoon.

 

Great Music, Music, Playlist

This Week’s Playlist: Power Pop

| Spike

I’m having a seriously shitty week, maybe one of the worst of my life, so it’s only natural that I would turn to happy music and to me happy music means great pop songs.

Wikipedia says that Pete Townshend invented the term “power pop” to describe the song “Pictures of Lily” in an interview. But people tend to think of power pop primarily as music from artists who were heavily influenced by the Beatles, mostly in the 1970’s, but continuing to this day.

So what does this actually mean? Who knows? For me, I think of soaring harmonies and jangly guitars and strong hooks that draw you in and won’t let go.

Continue reading “This Week’s Playlist: Power Pop” →

Great Music, Music, Playlist

This Week’s Playlist: Neil Young and Crazy Horse

| Spike

This week’s playlist features Crazy Horse, both with and without Neil Young, who hopefully does not need an introduction to any of this blog’s readers.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse have released at least 24 studio and live albums together. From 1969’s classic Everybody Knows This is Nowhere up through this year’s Colorado, Crazy Horse is the band that Young keeps coming back to. No one has ever accused them of being the greatest musicians around, but they have a perhaps unique ability to follow Young wherever he goes.

(If you’re curious, Wikipedia’s Neil Young discography lists 41 studio albums, 8 live albums, 4 soundtracks and 12 live albums in the archive series. And that’s just Young solo, it doesn’t include Buffalo Springfield or Crosby Stills Nash & Young or the Stills-Young Band.)

Continue reading “This Week’s Playlist: Neil Young and Crazy Horse” →

Hong Kong

Hong Kong Elections - Historic Results

| Spike

Yesterday saw the elections for Hong Kong’s District Councils and the results were unprecedented gains for pro-democracy advocates and a stunning rebuke of Carrie Lam and Beijing.

Usually around 40% of eligible voters turn out for this election; this year it was over 70%.

 

(Image from the NY Times)

Pro-democracy / anti-government candidates took 395 seats out of the 452 up for grabs. Pro-government / pro-Beijing seats are down to just 48, previously they had 300! Notorious anti-democracy councilors like Junius Ho and Michael Tien lost their re-election bids.

What remains to be seen are how Beijing and Carrie Lam will react to and follow up on this election and the creative ways they will find to continue to fuck things up. Beijing is 99% certain to blame the results on “foreign influence.”

Hong Kong’s district councils have limited power:

The councils are mandated to advise the Government on the following:

  • matters affecting the well-being of people in the District;
  • the provision and use of public facilities and services within the District;
  • the adequacy and priorities of Government programmes for the District;
  • the use of public funds allocated to the District for local public works and community activities; and

District councils also undertake the following within the respective districts with its available funds allocated by the government:

  • environmental improvements;
  • the promotion of recreational and cultural activities; and
  • community activities

(from Wikipedia)

But they are democratically elected, something which cannot be said of the more powerful Legislative Council (only half of the seats are directly elected) or the Chief Executive (elected by a committee of 1,200 stacked in favor of Beijing).

It’s a good day for Hong Kong. Let’s see what tomorrow brings.

Great Music, Music, Playlist

This Week’s Playlist: You Say You Want a Revolution

| Spike

It seems like the right time to take a break from doing playlists around decades or genres to focus in on songs of revolution and war.

Obviously I’ve got current events in Hong Kong in mind and I’ve tried to present a broad cross-section of songs of protest, revolution and war cutting across many different genres.

This was a tougher one for me to put together. I’ve spent a week working on it and remain convinced that there’s some obvious songs that I’ve missed.

But in terms of what is here, I started with the songs that were obvious to me - Jumping Jack Flash, Won’t Get Fooled Again, The Beatles’ Revolution, lots of Dylan and Leonard Cohen. You’ll also find a lot of reggae (and not just Bob Marley) because reggae has always been the music of revolution.

There’s a few duplicates - I Fought the Law by Bobby Fuller and the Clash, Rock the Casbah by the Clash and Rock el Casbah by Rachid Taha, War by both Edwin Starr and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. I chose Jennifer Warnes’ version of Leonard Cohen’s First We Take Manhattan because I love her voice and it’s got Stevie Ray Vaughan on guitar.

There are a few outliers, like the original Brinsley Schwarz version of (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace Love and Understanding. There may be one or two songs here that don’t really fit but that I included just because they felt right at the time.

I will admit that I got stuck in certain places. I didn’t include Born in the USA because it’s more a “soldier returning home from the war” kind of thing. There are also probably tons of punk songs from bands other than the Sex Pistols and the Clash, probably more hip hop than Public Enemy and NWA that I might have included but … well, I didn’t. Just me being me I suppose.

So here’s this week’s playlist - be sure to send me suggestions and comments for future updates!

Hong Kong

Today in Hong Kong November 19

| Spike

Things mostly wound down today.

Most of the protesters holed up in Polytechnic University surrendered to the police. Carrie Lam suggested that those under 18 should be released and allowed to return home. Those over 18 were arrested. As of late Tuesday night, approximately 100 protesters remain on campus. Monday saw an astonishing total of more than 1,000 arrests.

As you may recall, on Monday the HK High Court ruled the mask ban was unconstitutional. On Tuesday Beijing spoke up, with members of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee’s Legislative Affairs Commission (phew!) announced that the High Court could not rule on the mask ban, that only the NPCSC could “interpret” the Basic Law. It’s unknown at this point if they will decide to overturn the HK High Court decision. In the meantime, the mask ban will not be enforced in Hong Kong.

Continue reading “Today in Hong Kong November 19” →