Dental discounts in the Philippines are virtually unheard of unless the dentist is your relative. And even then you only get a discount on services, not on parts. However, dental hygiene seems to be taking a back seat to dental reconstruction, and quite a few dentists are now also into reconstruction and beautification. I seem to see more and more kids wearing braces than I did several years back, and gone is the belief that only kids with pliable gums can benefit from braces. Apparently adults in their twenties and older can too.

I’m not looking for some top-notch developer with code coming out of his ears. I want someone teachable, a fast learner and not averse to a night or two nights of overtime (with free dinner) in a month. But the pattern we seem to have reached at our workplace is everyone wants to join the tech group, and no one wants web development.

I’m not sure if it’s because of the non-challenge. My brand of web development is to create something attractive with a backend that the client cannot destroy. That means Joomla / WordPress and a good designer and a php coder. My brand of web development is to make it as easy for the client to maintain his site, with the minimum of help from us, so we can pick up and do other things.

I did get to interview a couple of guys, with two more perhaps next week (if they show up, because some of them email back and then do not show up). But until then the workload of the guy who left rests squarely on my shoulders, and I am doing double time again.

All work and no blogging makes for a stressed out Bambit. I look like someone an insurance agent would hesitate to give a life insurance quote to.

As I read the TR list I realized that in the Philippine context, Jason Hiner’s list was in the wrong order. This is the list as it appears on the article on Tech Republic.

5. You get a lot of fingers pointed at you
4. People assume you’re an expert in all things tech
3. You have to continually re-train, on your own dime
2. The hours are long and irregular
1. The job market is tumultuous and in transition

Having been in the I.T. business since 1995 (and a professed computer addict 10 years prior to that) I would say that list is upside down, and so may I offer my explanations to the same list, reordered for the Philippine I.T. setting.

5. The job market is tumultuous and in transition – Yes there are a lot of I.T. jobs out there, but quite a few of them are now going into the contractual basis which means a lot of money for the contractor but not for the programmer/developer/technician. There is also the I.T. brain drain out to Singapore, which has claimed a number of our better developers and technical support engineers.

4. The hours are long and irregular - I.T. has always been synonymous with long working hours, this is not something new, however it is always bewailed and belabored, like the habit of beating a dead horse.

3. You have to continually re-train, on your own dime – This may be true in a lot of offices, but not where I work. The company I work for pays for our training and certification exams and gives us an increase in pay (increase, not bonus) when we pass. Workers in other companies are not as fortunate.

2. People assume you’re an expert in all things tech – This is probably the most misunderstood aspect of I.T.  totally incomprehensible to non-I.T. beings. Everyone assumes that just because I can make a website I can also fix their motherboards and its popped ic’s and their hard disks that have crashed without any backups, and even fix their kitchen sinks as well.  I can’t. They think a programmer knows the same thing as a technical support engineer and are interchangeable. They’re not. There are times when I really feel like wearing one of the classic ThinkGeek shirts that say “No, I will not fix your computer.” (I can, actually, but I don’t wanna.)

1. You get a lot of fingers pointed at you – Yeah, but when something goes wrong with the machine all fingers are pointed at the I.T. guy. Case in point: ISP decides to change the IP address assigned to a company’s server “just for the heck of it” without telling anyone. As a result, no mail comes in or goes out. We come in and reconfigure the firewall to accommodate the new IP address, and the general manager (who in our case 9 out of 10 is an expat) is screaming expletives at us when he actually should have been screaming at the ISP. He doesn’t know or care about the difference. Tough, but hey, we get a lot of that, and it has made us stronger.

My eldest son had taken the UPCAT too, nine years ago. He had conjunctivitis on exams day, but he took it anyway, the proctor allowed him to keep his sunglasses on to protect his pride. He reminded me of this when he was here last week, after having heard the news that his kid brother had taken it as well. I had forgotten about it completely, and so he reminded me that I had waited outside UP Cebu campus until he came out. He passed that exam, but his chosen campus was UP Diliman, and after considering the expenses his going away was to incur, it was decided that he stay in Cebu and attend the University of San Carlos instead.

And I suppose memories such as these are the particular ones my mind blocks out, because they remind me of all the other wrong decisions I had made as a parent. Decisions that my children suffered for because I had, at the time, thought they were the best thing to do.

Along with these memories I suppose I had also forgotten friends mainly because I didn’t want to be reminded of that previous life. I can count those that remained friends to this day on one hand.

One of those friends is Danton Remoto. I first met Danton in the mid-80s at the Silliman University Summer Writers Workshop. I was this insignificant writer from Cebu and he was the up and coming poet from Manila. I knew little about him then, other than the fact that he was from the Ateneo. A few years later our paths crossed again at a literary gathering in Cebu. This was shortly after my uncle Amando F. Kapauan passed away, and Danton told me that their tables faced each other at the Ateneo de Loyola Faculty Lounge, and that he could still feel Kap’s presence when he sat there. A couple of more years after that I ran into him quite by accident at the Cafe Adriatico in Remedios. I was with my cousin’s banking friends and was trying not to look baffled by all the in-house jokes they were cracking, and I saw Danton floating up the stairs.

I do remember what he told me while I sat at his table. “Girl na girl ang aura mo kung hindi mo kasama asawa mo.” I remember pondering that remark when I went back to Cebu when my business trip was over. I suppose it was one of the things that firmed my resolve to sever my ties to the old life and start a new one.

Now Danton himself has embarked on a new life, from academic to politician. And we’ve crossed paths again, as I have volunteered my services in his quest for a seat in the Senate of the Republic of the Philippines in 2010. My post on the February 29 rally on Ayala has another photo of Danton and myself, when we happened to walk the same path towards the hub. That was when he told me he was running for the Senate, and when I told him he could count on my help for whatever he may need.

Danton Remoto in 2010.

Read about Danton on PinoyCentric

But this weekend Athelstan Emil was playing in the Magic: The Gathering Open Tournament, so in the hours when he was not playing, we had him at home.

Turns out I didn’t take anyone at all with me, but I did take a few pictures of the event, which you can view here.