IT is in lines that we most often come face to face with our government. How long the lines stretch and how comfortable an agency tries to make us, while we wait, demonstrate how much our public leaders care about us. Or how little.
Opening satellite offices in malls, as several agencies have done, has helped. But the Philippine Statistics Authority, formerly the National Statistics Office, has improved the most in terms of making its transactions as quick and painless for its customers. After ordering a birth certificate online, all one needs to do is pay the fee and courier’s charge in an accredited center, then wait a few days for the document to be delivered.
The foreign affairs department has also taken steps to speed up its passport service, but has to process so many that applicants who aren’t senior citizens sometimes end up traveling to a less busy satellite office. As of Dec. 29, those hoping for a passport processing appointment in the Dumaguete City or Mandaue City satellite offices had to wait until late February 2019 for an opening. (Try Bacolod, folks.) One could say this has the unintended benefit of stimulating domestic tourism, but the extra expense isn’t negligible. One would have spent less paying a travel agency to arrange for an appointment, but the department no longer allows that option.
The Land Transportation Office (LTO), for its part, has cut the printing of driver’s license cards to less than 30 minutes, from the encoding of one’s data to the card’s release. But if my experience last Friday is anything to go by, prepare to wait two to six hours for your turn. Bring water, lunch money, and something to read. Or learn to catnap in a chair.
A few weeks ago, I asked the LTO satellite office in SM City if I could claim my license card, to replace the official receipt that had served as my temporary license since November 2017. A clerk handed me a logbook and told me to return on Dec. 27, the earliest appointment. Good, I said, considering it was just a month away. No, the clerk replied. Come back in December 2019. While I do plan most of my days, I don’t know where I’ll be on Dec. 27, 2019. So when an acquaintance from church said that she had spent about three hours getting her driver’s license from LTO’s temporary printing site in Lapu-Lapu City, I took my chances.
More than 100 people were already in line when I arrived an hour before the Island Central Mall and the LTO was scheduled to open. The pretty young woman ahead of me said she had turned up after lunch the day before but was told the office couldn’t accept more clients. The man ahead of her, who had a rosary tattooed on the back of his left calf, said he had renewed his license a few months ago in another Mandaue mall but was told to get the card in Lapu-Lapu instead. The woman behind me told her partner that if he had awakened earlier that morning, they would have had the time to go to another LTO site in the SM Seaside City mall. He said he wouldn’t mind if the LTO turned him away that day, for as long as she got her driver’s license. Which was exactly the right thing to say.
Waiting in a confined space, one learns a thing or two about one’s fellow citizens. At least two people had sent a messenger or a personal assistant to endure the wait, and showed up only when the time came for them to sit for a photo and surrender their fingerprints and signature to a scanner. Those of us with no one who could bear the tedium for us went out briefly for lunch or snacks, did a bit of window-shopping, read, napped, checked our social media feeds or chatted. We kept an eye on those closest to us in line, because their every step forward meant our turn was close, too.
I received my driver’s license card six hours and 30 minutes after I had found my place in the queue and 14 months after the agency had actually renewed it. With any luck and better public management, I won’t have to go through that for the next four years.