Do IT Yourself

Wednesdays are always a bummer. Wednesdays are sloooow. Especially around Baclaran on Roxas Boulevard, City of Pasay, Metro Manila, Philippines. This is because Wednesday is Baclaran day, when all the faithful go to the weekly novena at the Redemptorist church. It’s where all northbound, southbound, eastbound and westbound vehicles converge and traffic is expected to be at a virtual standstill.

Wednesdays are when bus drivers choose to linger at bus stops even if there is no one on the sidewalk wanting a ride. Bus dispatchers and conductors shout their destinations, apparently in the hope that if they should loudly and long enough, people would miraculously appear on the sidewalk and get on the bus. Or people who are headed for destinations other than the bus’s signboards will change their minds and follow the dispatchers voice like mice to the Pied Piper.

Wednesdays in the office are sloooow. It’s the day when clients go out of their way to be painstakingly picky. It’s the day when suppliers twiddle their thumbs while they gaze blankly at purchase orders. Wednesday is always unbearably hot. Not even Typhoon Frank made it to Wednesday. Wednesdays is when counter personnel at any fast food joint choose to take their time fulfilling your order, and that’s because there’s hardly any customers either.

Wednesday is the purgatory we have to go through after the death of weekend life.

Last I used Microsoft Outlook was in my last year with Ng Khai Development Corp. in Cebu. Back then it was Outlook 97.

Ten years later it is now MS Outlook 2007, and I had all but forgotten how powerful it can be for companies running on an Exchange Server. I had all but forgotten my Exchange stuff as well, because the company I moved to in 1999 and still work for now runs on a Domino Server and Lotus Notes.

But we do have clients for whom we set up and configure Exchange servers, and we support hundreds of users on Microsoft Outlook. The changing times demanded that someone know how to use it, and well enough to each other people to use it as well.

And that’s why I, little green person in red cap and pants, am here at MISNet on Valero St. Makati, learning the rudiments of this much updated version of Microsoft’s email client. The seminar goes on for two days (been here since yesterday) and is arming me with enough information to pass on to our clients in a few days.

I don’t want to ask Ron, my instructor, how old he is. I just might find out he’s my eldest son’s age. But he appears expert in his field, MOS Certified and he happens to be a lomography buff as well.

In the wake of Typhoon Frank.

I remember a time decades ago, typhoons were given women’s names only. The weather bureau came up with names like Herming, Seniang, Yoling — diminutives for typically (at the time) Filipina given names. This was probably a hand over from World War II when US Army and Navy meteorologists monitoring tropical cyclones over the Pacific would name these natural occurrences after their wives or girlfriends.

But when the Philippine weather bureau PAGASA started using men’s names I started to wonder: were there women in the bureau naming these calamity-bringers after their husbands and boyfriends, ex- and otherwise?

Typhoon Frank wasn’t forecast as a super typhoon, but it wrought increasing damage over the metropolis and killed more than 200 people. Not since Typhoon Milenyo has anything like this happened to my country. School is suspended in all levels and I still have to verify as of this writing, whether the seminar I’m supposed to attend at 9am today is pushing through. If you catch me blogging through the day, it probably didn’t.

Related reading:

• Philippine Disasters and Calamities
• Disasters Timeline, Philippines