Registering for Upcoming Elections

I can now say that it is neither fun nor easy to try voting here in the Philipppines. I am sorry to say that I am beginning my blog on such a sour note..but, permit me to rant and rave, as I really do need to get this off my chest.

It was a drastic rush to the newly built half of our subdivision's basketball court early this morning, as we all tried to be in line first...Only, there was no line...two tables were set up. One was for encoding data to the computer, the other one  was where various forms were to be gathered. As a new voter, I had no idea on what I was supposed to do, and neither did my companion, Jocel, who was just as clueless as I was. We reluctantly approached the huddle that surrounded the table that contained the registration forms and stood behind the people clamoring to get there hands on paperwork held by an obnoxious gay person...(on record, I have nothing against gay people, I am a big fan of Ellen Degeneres, Elton John, and Sir Ian McKellen) who poured all his attention to this bulky male officer who just had to step right in front of us. We eventually got our RF. We returned later after we filled them up, looking for the inkpad to place our thumbprints. Apparently, people have been passing the thing around and it took us several minutes before we finally caught up with it. People who were supposed to give us information as to what to do next were in no mood to talk to us. They wouldn't respond to our questions, which weren't rude in anyway. More irritating than that, the woman we were asking for instructions kept on shooing us away from the table, saying that we might trip over the wires of the computer that was gathering data for the upcoming elections.

Then, I blew up. I cut off the bruha (relentless diva) who was ubod ng taray (superbly obnoxious) kept on yapping at us on where we should stay and wait. No one was telling us what to do next, everyone was pointing at someone else, not really being helpful, only wanting to pass us onto someone else. In the end, the computer finally crashed. It probably couldn't stand the heat. In the midst of all that waiting, we weren't even allowed to sit down...the inkpad that run amok, the election officers who kept on complaining about what we were all doing wrong...when it was them who collected the forms, only finding out later that they weren't capable of processing them today, so it all boiled down to the fact that we had to come back tomorrow, because incompetent people who were incapable of implementing a systematic process kept blaming other people for their sheer lack of common sense.

Yes, it was truly a waste of more than two hours of waiting around for nothing in that basketball court that embodied the whole Philippine system: great ideas that fell short in the execution, and resulted to half-baked products byobstinate dolts.