Calling PLDT and VECO

Is this experience familiar? Your phone has no dial tone. You make a report to PLDT’s repair service. If you are fortunate to get through finally (and/or have someone at the other end finally listen to your service request), you are told that they will have the problem checked soonest possible time.

“Soonest” can be a very relative term, however. It can mean within the day, some day or days after or perhaps longer?

In fairness, some repair service crew do appear within a day or two after the call to PLDT. Their presence, however, does not guarantee that your phone will be repaired. Why? Only they can answer that.

About two days ago, something must have caused many phones within Cebu City to stop operating. Immediately, many called up PLDT’s repair service to report this incident. Today is the third day after that call we made to PLDT.

Yesterday, a repair crew appeared, checked, and left with many of our phones in the village in the same situation before they came, still without any dial tone. Why? It seems the instruction given was to have the community electrician/maintenance instead check the wires that affected the PLDT lines. Why did PLDT refer us to our electrician? Please call PLDT to find out their reason. Perhaps for faster repair service, instead of calling up and relying on PLDT, you may wish to call your electrician first?

Anyway, we are very happy to report that three days after the dial tone “died” out on us, the dial tone is back, thanks to our electrician!

But on a more serious and urgent note, we hope that VECO will also finally heed our request made to them last March 13. In a letter addressed to The Head of the Visayan Electric Company, we called their attention to an emergency situation involving a VECO electric post that was almost leaning on top of our house roof! Our letter noted that “the proximity of this leaning electric post with its high voltage wires will definitely adversely affect our safety,” and so, from March 13, we have written our request for VECO for their speedy attention and swift action to address this emergency situation.

We channeled our request through the offices of Councilor Alvin Dizon and Councilor Nida Cabrera. Immediately, was it only a day or 2 after, a VECO crew came to survey the situation! Talk about speedy action, you may be prone to conclude like us.

However, after that visit, to date, from March 13 until today, the leaning electric post very close to our house roof is still there and we remain threatened by the possible risk and danger that this will pose to us and our property!

Are we merely imagining the danger? We certainly wish so. However, once before this write-up, sparks started to emanate from the same leaning post. Only our children were home at that time. The sparks caused brown-out for our whole village then.

VECO once again appeared and gratefully took care of the sparks. But yes, you are right, VECO came and left, without taking care of the leaning post by our house!

We hope VECO will come and straighten this leaning electrical post. Not only are the high voltage wires dangerous. The post is made of solid concrete and will certainly not spare anything that gets in its way once it will decide to give up leaning someday! We pray VECO spares us that day, we hope VECO hears our call for help and we hope VECO finally straightens and that they will fix this leaning electric post of theirs before any serious untoward incident takes place!

Now that rains are very frequent in Cebu, the likelihood of the soil loosening up and making the foundation for the electric post more unstable increases the dangers of having that leaning VECO post unattended indefinitely!

Urgently calling VECO please to spare us from this leaning post lined with so much high-voltage wires!

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