out of sight, out of mind

i. foresight

my father has this habit of bundling up the family and taking us all the way to fairview every once in a while to have lunch and|or dinner with his co-workers at radio veritas asia, where he does charity newscasting once a week. since veritas is a catholic radio station, the aforementioned colleagues consist of foreign priests and missionaries from the south asian region.

this year, we went the week after christmas in order to have new year's lunch with them. my father noticed a large mound of gifts gathering dust in a far corner and asked what that was about, probably thinking they were being reserved for charity. father john, who served as the hindi news team leader, quietly told us that they were gifts from the team to 'friends' of the radio station, who had promised to visit them before the year ended.

where does one go from there?

ii. shortsight

i needed to go to the hp service center in makati to find a replacement adaptor for our printer. having passed by the shop only once before, the only clue i had to its exact whereabouts was that it was located somewhere in the vicinity of the insular life building on ayala avenue. i therefore took a washington jeep along ayala, keeping an eye out for some sign of the insular life building, but decided to bail out at a starbucks on the street across from the stock exchange, in case i'd gone too far.

while about to enter the underpass that would enable me to retrace my route, i noticed a sign that denoted the locations of two delifrance outlets, one of which was in the "insular building, 1 min away". so the insular building was a minute away. not too far, except that the accompanying arrow was pointing left, and the underpass had no tunnel in that direction.

that meant that the insular building was either a) on the corner street from where i was, or b) on the corner street from where i was, but on the opposite side. since the sign was located within the underpass, i assumed that option b was correct, and walked in that direction, until i caught sight of the mandarin hotel and knew that something was amiss. i then crossed paseo de roxas at the makati avenue intersection and walked back to the starbucks, this time on the opposite side of the road. in another five minutes i was back at the starbucks, with neither insular life building nor delifrance successfully located.

i decided to walk along ayala avenue towards edsa, thinking that perhaps the signs were misprinted. i gave up and turned back at the manila penn - i didn't recall that the hp center was that close to greenbelt. casting my eyes to heaven, i began to question what manner of supernatural trickery could exist in modern-day makati, when lo and behold! i saw the letters "lar life" on the side of a familiar-looking granite building. i ran back, in the direction of the letters, until the roof of the underpass cut them off. upon exiting said underpass, i found myself back at starbucks.

what the fuck.

turns out, the letters were on the second or third floor of the building, impossible to sight from street-level unless you look straight up. the delifrance was one minute's walk into the building, not from the corner. oh, and the hp center was closed for the holidays.

iii. hindsight

my father works for the kkc group of companies, which is a conglomeration of different businesses. this means that he occasionally has lunch with executives from one of the other kkc branches. yesterday, he had lunch with someone from the industrial-strength vacuum cleaner department, who was entertaining one of their best salesmen from the states: a certan ramon, who claims to be formerly of the disco music group hagibis.

to prove his authenticity, he regaled the dining customers with a one-man rendition of katawan, the impeccability of which my father could not verify, aside from his being unusually spirited. as for myself, i can find no listing of hagibis members online, as all links redirect me to pages concerning the typhoons of 2003.

but then again, what is there to gain for a vacuum cleaner salesman to gain by falsely claiming such? past or present, his job still sucks.

sige ingat.ü 
posted by stani at 3:48 PM