Communication

The longer I stay here the more I understand the system of communication here. When I say 'communication' I'm not referring to just day to day communication in english or tagalog, I'm referring to how people get ahold of each other here to communicate. Obviously phones and email exist here but these forms of communication aren't always reliable. I've had a few instances in the past where I needed to make an appointment for something. Armed with a business card with a telephone number, a cellphone number, and an email address I started my long annoying battle of attempting to make an appointment with the dentist. First attempt: telephone. After calling, getting a busy signal and then recalling a few hundred times within several hours I thought, "this is stupid" and decided to move onto the next form of communication: cellular phone. This time I either received a busy signal or endless ringing. No one ever picked up. And when the ringing actually stopped and a voice came on the line it was a recorded message from the cell phone company informing me that, "the voice mail service is currently out of order". From what I understand, the 'voice mail service' has been 'out of order' for three years now. I think it's time the phone company admits defeat and records a message that says, 'the voice mail service doesn't exist'. So, the second attempt, the cellphone, was also a losing battle. I decided not to attempt the email option because I've had nothing but nonexistent success with that in the past (for example, I've written emails to festivals asking where I can buy tickets and I never received a response. Why even offer your email address to sell tickets if you're not going to reply?). So here I was, half a day wasted trying to make a dentist appointment with no success. I told Aimee about my frustration and she suggested I send them a text message and make the appointment that way. I thought to myself, "you can do that?". Text messaging in Canada is pretty much a social friend to friend type thing, not a customer to business type of thing. So I figure, why not, I'll give it a try. 30 seconds later I receive a text back that reads, "ok sir ur dent app is 2pm on nov 12". Success! Since this text messaging revelation, I've been asking businesses for their cellphone numbers rather than their land line numbers. That way I'm always guaranteed a stress free text messaging experience! Since this time all appointments have been done via text messaging: my cat's vet appointments are one example. Another is spa appointments. Every week Aimee receives a text from a spa company saying such things as, "good evening, would you like a nice relaxing massage?". Why yes text message, I would!

The ease of text messaging does have some negative sides though. Over here, text messages are becoming a bit like spam emails. On a daily basis I receive several text messages informing me I'm a winner of something or other. I'm happy that the world of text messages hasn't developed into porn related nonsense like email spam. Thankfully I receive less text messages than spam emails. I don't know if I could handle the 'beep beep beep' of my cellphone several hundred times a day!