Thursday, June 26, 2008 Covington: The Equitable Bank and Pluto By Gary Covington Looking In
I LOVED Uncle Jun's Thursday comment; that today's school notebooks are arty-crafty and consequently expensive, not plain and simple as in his (and my) school days.
Ours were a deep red, the front cover plain excepting spaces ˙for name and class. On the reverse, as Jun mentions, were printed the multiplication tables and a glorious jumble of weights and measures.
"Pinches, pecks, gills and quarts. Farthings, half pennies and florins. Stones and bushels and even something called a scruple. All gone now and I'm not sure if that's good or bad. Calculating with a base of 10 is all very well but have you noticed -- that the art of mental arithmetic is almost dead? And that we oldies, used to reckoning in 12s or 60s or 3s, are so much more nimble when it comes to "doing it in our heads."
Some months ago I was bemoaning the fact that the Philippines is a nation of secrets. Information is never voluntarily given out, it's the old dictum of knowledge means power taken to ridiculous lengths -- this is MY bit of information and I'm NOT going to give it to anybody.
The usual culprits are government agencies but the commercial establishment is catching up fast˙ -- see below.
It took me the best part of half a year, letters by the handful and a free CD of the memorial service -- that's me on the left in a white shirt -- to convince the Equitable Bank, specifically their Equitable Card division, that my late wife was indeed late.
That I had destroyed her card, snipped into a zillion snippets; that I had paid the outstanding balance and that I never wanted to hear from them ever again.
But there's always a but, isn't there? Equitable's invoicing department held this piece of information close to their chest, not feeling it necessary to notify Equitable Card's renewal department. The two presumably lodge in the same building and this is the age of click communication but no matter -- the other day, by recorded delivery, I received my late wife's shiny new credit card valid until the year 2010.
Any bets on how long it'll be before the invoices start rolling in again?
Silly news of the week was the ongoing squabble amongst astronomers about how to classify Pluto and its moons -- the ninth rock from the sun, which I will stubbornly continue to call a planet orbited by moons and not a dwarf accompanied by plutoids.
What is it about us? Why are we always so keen to demote? To trivialize? What's wrong with Pluto being a planet and can you imagine Lucky Starr, Space Ranger, gunning his ship past a plutoid? Heaven help us.
Lastly, and my horrorscope on Tuesday read, "Weird is in the eye of the beholder." Thank the stars -- I was beginning to think it was me.
