After typhoon Glenda tore through our village like a corrupt politician (I’ve said it many times before, if PAGASA insist on renaming typhoons, they should name them after corrupt politicians and NGOs. Because both start with a lot of hot air and then end up taking everything you have) But I digress.
Anyway, micro rant over, we needed to take the kids and my father in law somewhere with electricity, so we packed up the car and headed over to my brother’s apartment in Salcedo village for the night. This was Wednesday. It was only the morning after did I realize the Trailblazer was coding. And the problem was, I’m parked on the street in the heart of Makati, which has a three hour limit and no coding window.
So the dilemma is, I need to move my car to avoid towing. But by doing so, I’m most likely going to get nabbed for coding. So I choose the lesser of the two evils and drove.
Sure enough, I get hailed down by a traffic enforcer. And to compound my problems, in my haste, I realized I had left my license behind. So you can probably guess what happened next.
Enforcer: “Sir, color coding po tayo.”
Me: “Sorry, sir. Please write me out the ticket.”
Enforcer: “License sir.”
Me: “Um, I’m very sorry but I left it in the house. I was in a hurry to get my kids out after the storm that I left it behind.”
Enforcer: “Naku! Driving without license is very serious!”
Me: Actually, sir, it is failure to carry my license, which carries a 1,000 peso penalty. So please feel free to write my ticket up as failure to carry license as well as number coding” (there’s no color, most especially with the new plates.)
Enforcer: “But I need to confiscate your license first before I can write the ticket.”
Me: “You do realize that the violation is failure to carry a license, which loosely translated means I don’t have it on me. Now, if I could produce the license to comply with your mandatory confiscation, there wouldn’t be a violation to begin with.
Sound of crickets. I could almost see the buffering symbol spinning on his forehead when he just instinctively said: “But I must confiscate your license.”
So I replied by saying: “Ok”
Awkward silence.
Enforcer: (annoyed) “O sige nalang, basta next time make sure you bring your license!”
Now funny as it was, it reveals a gaping big loophole in the whole system. Because as effective as they believe it to be, if the only method of guaranteeing the payment of fines is the illegal confiscation of your license, what happens when you don’t have a license to give? They may try to take your plate, which once again is illegal under the circumstances, but if your plate is one of those laminated plastic boards with your conduction sticker number hand written on it, what then?
I’m certainly not encouraging anyone to break the law here by purposely not carrying their license, but this situation clearly shows the problem if people forget to. And with 2.5 million cars plying Metro Manila roads everyd
