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Every year-end the writers of philiblogs.com put their heads together and compile a list of the Top Ten Twerps of the year in the Philippines. Since we’re all getting lazier each year, we’ve decided, starting this year-end, to just name a single Philippine Twerp of the Year. So, without much ado (don’t you just hate that phrase?), philiblogs.com gives you the 2007 Philippine Twerp of the Year:

GLOBE BROADBAND

And here’s why:

Globe Broadband’s service has been, to say the least, erratic for months now, especially in the Visayas and Mindanao regions. They not only have been giving their subscribers slow connections, but at times no connections at all and even lasting for more than a day.

When you call up support, you’re immediately fed with a recorded message weakly explaining that network restoration is ongoing and that the system will normalize "in the soonest possible time" (which actually can be from now until Armageddon). Because you’ve been hearing that same recording for months now, you’re thought is, "How long is this restoration going to take?"

So you’d rather speak to a real human voice to get the real score. However, when a live techie goes on the line, guess what? He/she merely reads the transcribed form of the recorded explanation!

When you try to delve deeper into what the cause of the problem is, they don’t know. When you ask when can you hope for the connection to return, they also don’t know. You feel like you’re a senator in an inquiry interrogating Iggy Arroyo. You’re just not getting any answers!

Thus, instead of being comforted, you get infuriated. Having nothing else to say, all the techie will utter is, "We’re really sorry for the inconvenience," like a broken record (I refuse to say anything that would incriminate me, senator).

The least Globe Broadband could do is to somehow let someone from higher management communicate with subscribers and detail what is the cause of the problem, what they’re doing about it and when is the estimate time of complete restoration.

They can do this through a print ad, through snail mail, e-mail or even telephone. But they choose to scrimp on expenses, remain quiet and leave the subscriber in the dark. Instead, they would rather feed a recorded message or techies reading the script of the recorded message.

Then you start to see all these slick advertisements on TV on how wonderful Globe Broadband is, plus marketing tents cropping up all over the place where sales reps talk about the technology of Globe Broadband; and you just know the costs of these can run up to hundreds of thousands of pesos a month.

Yet, they do little to satisfy the demands of their current customers.

Globe Broadband gives new meaning to the term, "customer service."

For this it is given the distinguished title of "2007 Philippine Twerp of the Year!"

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In a previous blog I had hoped that Antonio Trillanes’ idealism would make him a good senator in spite of my doubts that he was merely a pawn. Read it here.

Now, I’m convinced, without a shadow of doubt, he’s a pawn. His latest misadventure establishes that.

His financiers probably used him like a guinea pig. Told that "People Power" would follow his latest "uprising," he and Gen. Lim trooped to the Manila Peninsula hotel and held siege. No "People Power" came. A political has-been came, by the name of Teofisto Guingona, but hardly anyone noticed him.

Before this, in the aftermath of the Glorietta explosion, someone whispered to him that the explosion was caused by a bomb planted by the government. Immediately, he went public with this sans any evidence, saying that the informers were being kept in a safehouse.

After police came out with the results that it was a gas tank explosion, nothing came out again from Trillanes.

Trillanes could have used his idealism to effect a senatorial presence and use senatorial power to reach out to disenfranchised Filipinos and establish a political base through which he can legally challenge the administration.

Many, I believe, would follow and support him.

His election into the Senate was no small feat. Yet, he threw this in the garbege can of obscurity with his latest fiasco.

Now he’ll be spending many years in prison and the name, Antonio Trillanes IV, will be a mere speck in the history of the Philippines, known as a man whose idealism fizzled out even before it had sparked.

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