EVERYTHINGS A MESS

Had to admit that things right now for me are getting difficult, So difficult that I'm starting to live on getting any scraps I could get my hands on. Anyway its no surprise for me on this difficult situation given that I will be spending my 4th month here in the Philippines, and by logical thinking any supplies that I had stored before I arrived here have already been exhausted. Come to think of it my supplies actually would go as far as for this month if I haven't gave more than half of my saving on shouldering expenses at the house, A terrible mistake that I'm learning now  because I should have at least left half of my savings to myself. Some people say that being selfless is not that bad , but apparently in reality it’s a lot more complicated and it was a bad idea for me to contribute as it dragged me down to being helpless,. (the third time for me to happen)

 

For the moment , there is no news yet on when will I be sent overseas and my phone line for the office has been silent for months now - it is not determine yet if my company has any plans at all, which makes matters worse for me and I'm starting to think that it's about time I do something on this grinding halt. My latest visit on my company didn’t yield any significant results and only determined that I don’t need to go to another Medical exam after three months , and that validity

 

I had already planned out on what I'm going to do and all that needs now is a little money for me to reorganize and be back on track and get a local land based job.  For now given with the lack of funding , I'm stuck on doing part of my plan that doesn't involve anything with money like updating my resume (which I haven't done since 2012) and the like. 

 

This is the layout of what I will be doing within the next couple of days to few months (depends on the funding available and what I can find ).

 

PHASE A. "ReOrganize"

 

*Recover My Seaman's book (have to go to my company and "borrow" it)

*Update my Resume  (I have some old file on my computer)

*Print Resume  (just go to any nearby computer shop to print a few copies)

*Update my Chest X-Ray (I'd probably get these in a private medical Clinic)

*Update and get a NBI Clearance ( Apparently there's a new method so I heard)

*(Optional) get picture ID's , both 1x1 and 2x2 in civilian attire.

 

PHASE B. "ACTUAL"

 

*Search for a possible BPO company suited for me,

(this is a long process actually , The criteria for me will be that it should have facilities that are open and free to use and the companies location)

*Look for work there on the company

*Survive till I get the paycheck.

 

Sounds fairly simple if I have the funding, but of course it gets complicated since I don’t have it. Hopefully this will keep me occupied until things on the house would stabilize.

 

In other news…

 

Internal situations inside the house have been hard and it is embarrassing for me to write and admit that I'm already experiencing hunger and famine. In fact while writing this I have only ate once in a day (and the same goes for yesterday) due to the lack of available food around. Its seems sadly that mom's sickness has already took its toll and dragged everyone down into the brink of financial ruin. In theory and practice my sister and I could support the routine  maintenance of dialysis session, but regrettably not the unforeseen medical expenses, these combined with mom's hypochondriac paranoia, and emotional disorder are a deadly mix. Mom took advantage and exploited the fact that I was an OFW and that I had financial capabilities. She squander a lot of money on unnecessary medical expenses and thru hospitalization, instead of focusing only on dialysis session. Even the simplest of colds or difficulty breathing was reason enough for her to spend a few weeks on hospital confinement , even though she is medically fine as what the doctors tell at the hospital, Didn’t matter to her that she is using the hard earned money coming from me - all she cared about was recklessly spend.

 

Imagine the money that was thrown out just because of that and it was wrong of her to put the trust in a public hospital which never gave any medical treatment at all but charged us with 30,000 to 50,000 PHP per medical confinement.

 

For me as an OFW, I didn’t have the time to check what was going - nor even have the capacity to see what was actually happening, given that my situation as a sailor was very constricting to communications,. It took days before I received anything on the satellite email and days before they received anything, and the emails I had received barely describe on what is actually happening.

 

Eventually this Mom's imaginary illness , took its toll on the long run and eventually dragged me and my sister to financial trouble. The latest news now is that the dialysis clinic refused to help us until we settled first our bills (which amounted now close to 30,000 Php). Same thing goes as well on my younger sister's numerous friends, basically her debts are left and right and most of her "friends" avoid her because of it. I don’t have anything against with these people nor on the public hospitals dialysis clinic refusals to help us because those are bad debts , that needed to be addressed - otherwise it's not surprising that they won't help us at all. Regrettably Mom wasn’t wise in spending and resulted now in her being put on hold on from receiving medical treatment until it's settled. 

 

We couldn't use this so called PHIL Health medical insurance because last month's disastrous hospitalization, resulted in complete depletion of that insurance on reserved for at least for 6 months. She just used it all in one blow on the last hospitalization.      

 

There are days that I just simply wish to wanted to end and "fast forward" on to the next, however it only meant to be troubled again on the next day to replay the horror of starvation, A repetitive and looping nightmare. Most of the days (actually already a month now) , I just went to my pc and spend my time there and played games , hoping that the hours and days would simply be over soon. It worked for a couple of weeks as a diversion but then again video games is just a retreat from unpleasant realities through fantasy - never solved anything , just delayed problems.

 

Anyway it's all said and done. Despite my rambling on this writing , I have to face these and resolve in any way possible. All I can say is that my house is a mess right now.

 

WHEN AND WHERE PART

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DEADLOCKE SITUATION

EVENTS HAPPENED ON JANUARY 25TH

Being stuck in the hospital is a dragging situation for a week now and there is no sign yet that it will be over anytime soon. I guess being inside the hospital starting 10 pm till 12 noon the following day babysitting mom is stressful enough, More stressful in the sense is mom is not cooperating at all., As expected amang rodriguez hospital is doing nothing in treating their patients and just gave mom an oxygen tank bottle for her to breathe.

 

The whole hospital area is littered with patients , even on walking spaces - the patients are line-up outside in hospital beds , and on my perception the whole place looks like a 21st century makeshift bomb shelter hospital bunker like you see in the movies.

 

Another week came by and it was still the same, It was mentally and physically grueling being there , I only sleep roughly two hours each day and some of the days none at all. It was a blessing that I bring along my tablet PC on the hospital to keep me from getting bored to death on doing nothing during on my "guard". Basically the public hospital hasn’t done anything significant yet to medically treat mom , they just simply change her oxygen bottle once in a while and that’s basically sums everything up for the whole day.

 

Anyway I don't expect much in a public hospital these days in the Philippines, Medical care here as like in any third world country is extremely cruel and self-serving. On top of that medical staffs like doctors and nurses, certainly don’t live up to their names as being "life saver's" and believe it or not they have total disregard for human (Filipino)lives - CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT !??

 

Speaking of which a few days ago, one of the nurses in the female ward apparently ripped me off and stole a pack of medicines from me. Well she didn’t exactly "grabbed" our stuff without permission , but what she did was tell me to hand over our supply of medicines I had and said that since this is a hospital ward, all medications must be first hand over to the nurse station - for them to give to the patient. Being clueless on what was going on and that I haven't been on the hospital in years now, I handed it over in good fate - the whole medicine pack, not knowing what was going on. Two days later I found out from my younger sister that they never gave my mom any of the meds I turned over on the nurse station - NOT A SINGLE TABLET AT ALL, and it gets better when I heard from my younger sister that nurses here in the public hospital often steal meds from patients and profit from then by selling the meds they stole.

in the public hospital , you see people die right of youre eyes. infact everyone on the whole medical ward see's a person catch his last breath live.

A WEEK OF DARKNESS

Previously - word from Career Ship management has made work as a sailor to a grinding halt and the worst part is that they gave no definitive date on when will be this "floating status" to be over. From the looks of it , it won't be over for a while. NSB for now doesn’t guarantee that I'd be back there (or be back at all) once their cadetship program is over.

With no assurance on when will I be back , it further pushes economic and financial strain on my house and soon I have to think or resort to ways to get some cash. I came up with a couple of plans , nothing solid for now and it will change depending on the situation. Nearest I could think of is to return back to the BPO , given that it only takes a small amount of money to get there compared to being a sailor . If it gets worse then it's possible that I have to look for work on a different shipping company altogether and ditch out Career Ship Management - and it will be easy for me given that my U.S. Visa is still active and I don’t have any financial obligations so far in Career.

I had all the time to think about my situation , but for now I'm occupied in more pressing internal matters

Can't believe it that 15 years , My house is once again will be plunged into darkness - literary. I have no idea and do not know what’s exactly is going on, but I was caught dumb folded on the morning of January 15th when a personnel coming from the electric company visited our house and said that they will have to cut off the electric supply of our house due to unsettled bills. I was in disbelief at first and was hoping that it was all a big mistake, unfortunately when I checked the paper from the technician it confirms that, house will be disconnected. The Technician said that he wanted to speak to who's is in charge of the electric bill. I hurriedly went back inside calmly and told my dad that he should speak to the person from the electric company, To my dismay my dad was unwilling or simply too caught on the surprise that I had to shout numerous times for him to go outside and approach the personnel. Figuring that it was taking too long , I also went outside to see what's going on , it was by stroke of luck that the technician gave us a 24 hours before he pulls the plug and left - probably out of empathy on seeing my dad.

Immediately i sent an SMS to my sister informing the situation on the house, 5 hours later I received a reply via SMS and told her everything. She says "She'd see what she can do on the situation" . Up to now a few hours later I'm still having anxiety problems about it. The funny thing about this situation is that my mom and dad doesn’t seemed to mind or even bother that the electricity here in the house will be cut off, they did the usual thing they do every day.

Eventually It was found out that the technician that came to the house isn't exactly a technician at all or even associated to the electric company, turns out that this person was some sort of scammer and was trying to rip out the house off by stealing the electric meter installation. Apparently from what I learned on my sister the , Electric meter installed on the house has some sort of monetary valued if stolen and sold which attracted con's and planned to steal it. Recalling back the electric metered installed on the house has been unchanged for 17 years and it's still analogue compared to today's digital electric meter.

The second time the con man arrived , I locked the gate and said that I have to verify first his association with the electric company. Immediately called my younger sister for help and they had a conversation on the phone (I set it to loudspeaker). On the conversation the con man failed to identify who he was and his association to the electric company, and when my sister mentioned that she's going to call her classmate during high school who now works in the Electric company. The man made excuses and hurriedly left .

Funny in the sense that if you're really are associated and work for the electric company , why would the man leave in such a hurry.

After the small trouble , another bigger problem awaits ..

On the early morning of Wednesday , January 20th . We had to rush mom on the local public hospital due to complaints about her breathing, we didn’t take it seriously and assumed that Mom was just making a ruse to return to the toxic environment of the hospital - like she did a lot of times before. 

We did disagree of her returning to the Rodriguez Hospital on numerous reasons, The most notable why we don’t want her to the hospital is because they won't treat her there anymore and that she will be just put on hold in that place indefinitely without any cure or remedy. In other words Government Hospitals would be more of like a prison rather than a place for treatment, and not only do they refuse to give treatment but, will held you off against you're will until you paid them off. Imagine paying money for nothing or paying money for detention. Anyway eventually mom had her way and we had to put her on the hospital, and as expected mom is being held there and the hospital refuse to give any treatments , they only thing they could provide was the expensive oxygen tanks for mom to breathe - beyond that there's nothing more.

It's already a fact that mom's condition is terminal and there is no cure, the only remedy we knew is "Kidney dialysis" , which is a last ditch effort - beyond that line , its death. Being in a public hospital and seeking treatment there doesn't help either, Not only are the doctors and staff are rude but generally care little about human lives and on top of that The whole facility is run downed that there's a possibility that a healthy person would get infected and catch a diseases sooner or later there.

Mom insists in staying and being in the hospital without any knowledge of the repercussion of what will be our condition there, she doesn’t have any idea that being in a Philippine government hospital is one of the worst places on earth for medical care. A little slice of hell on earth in the Philippines.

DISC IMAGE

Never occurred to me that my sister would catch up and get me a new star bucks planner . In fact I thought that getting that darn planner would never materialize at all, hopefully my sister proved me wrong and on the morning of January 03 my sister came to my study tablet and gave me this small star bucks paper bag and inside it was the long waited (and highly desired) collectible star bucks planner 2016. My eyes lit up like wild fire the minute I saw what's inside the paper bag and got my hands on it. Of course I immediately posted on all my social media accounts that I got a new 2016 star bucks planner . Facebook , Twitter and even Instagram. This seems childish but it always brings me a smile on  each year to get this notebook, no matter how shitty or crappy year I had.

So what's the difference of the new 2016 SB planner than last year, first off the new planner they issue is a bit of a setback compared to last year , with a much smaller space and a lot less paper inside it. So basically star buck fans were not very happy to see their beloved planner to be downsized after that much trouble in collecting the stickers first , and as a matter of fact - up to now the new 2016 planner is still being distributed, (compared to last year that it sold of early). Regardless of the disappointment of fans, I'm thankful that my sister gave me one and she went on that trouble just to get one, - it's kind of a tradition that started way back in 2011 that my sister yearly gave me this. Given that I myself is a prolific write I enjoy every bit of material that is given to me that I can write on during my spare time, given that my situation being frequently trapped on a floating gas station  

Aside from that …

Lately I had been studying and digesting a lot of information about financial investing , since I'm planning to start an investment account later this year. I had to be patient in reading and at least understanding on every detail I need to know before I venture on this uncharted area. For now I had to painstakingly understood on a lot of jargon terms and terminology which give me a migraine every time I try to understood it. Anyway it's obvious for me that it may take me a while to fully understand what's going on.

Thru tremendous searching on the net , I stumbled upon a blogsite titled "investor Juan" which teaches some terminology and basics about investing and how to make your money roll, now of course it's not exactly a certified rule book but it gives idea's on what to do about the money.  (just type and search it on google)

Another thing I will write about is the recent discovery I made on how to hide pirated installer DVD / CD's from airport security. And yes I computer science this shit up for the convenience of the whole OFW out there.

As we all know in airport security basic's, this is one of the prohibited item's that should not be brought along on the trip (at least on the airport) and anyone caught possessing such item carries a penalty of a few thousand dollars to a few years of jail time depending on which country you got caught. Now for my perspective since having a pirated DVD / CD's are the lesser evil on the long list of prohibited items on airport security , I decided to share my discovery on how to get past airport security, and in general carrying pirated Cd's without actually carrying a physical pirated DVD / CD's inside my luggage.

Remember that the data inside the CD's are more important that the physical CD's themselves. Of course I have to apologize on this part because this requires and average to advance skill in computer to pull this off , which as far as I know mostly Filipino OFW's have poor or below average on computer skills which includes also Filipino Sailors, so basically this will be difficult to be understood for a common OFW.

Anyway here's the thing , all you need is this.

LAPTOP / COMPUTER that has a DVD / CD Drive

External DVD reader / writer (in case you're computer doesn’t have a CD drive)

Pirated DVD's or CD's (Stuff that you will copy data from)

Any CD copying software (in my personal choice is daemon tools pro advance)

A little brain power (seriously)

Steps

1 install any Daemon tools pro advance virtual disk drive on your pc . Compatible with windows 7 , 8 , 8.1 and 10, this creates a virtual disk drive on the computer's hard drive which in turn will be needed later on to read the copied data.

2 put the pirated CD / DVD on the CD tray of the computer or external drive.

3 Run the Daemon tools and choose the option "make disc image" , or anything similar that copies the disc.

4 Store in your computer or any external storage device like , hard drives, memory cards etc.

Presto now you have a disc data that doesn't have a physical CD. Just remember that in order for the data to be played you have to "mount" the data first to the virtual data drive , then play it there via any media player or any other programs that plays the disk.

Overall by virtualizing or whatever you call the process in copying an image disc , it greatly reduces the possibility of an OFW being searched or detected in their luggage some pirated DVD's or CD on the airport , because there's no CD's inside in the first  place - well at least physical CD's, it's now  just only disc files inside a compact hard drive. This is the practical application of my discovery to a common OFW's perspective.

In other news …

January came and I was figuring out what the hell has happened on Career and why haven't they called me yet, more thing that adds to my puzzle was the recent call made by Mr. Nidoy. So I decided to drop by a week after new year and see what the hell was going on,  When I came to visit - I immediately checked the IVRS system and see if the "line-up" for me on Cape Texel was still active . Unfortunately it isn't and I went next to the processing counter to confirm if I was removed , it checked out. The last objective of my visit is to know why and had to see Mr. Nidoy on the explanation, He told me that the reason why Cape Texel was scrubbed was on the fact that Filipino crewmen there got laid off and replaced by Chinese crew and there are still figuring me out on what ship will I be reassigned. The main bottom line is that I'm in a "floating" status, no line up's awaiting and definitely extended on vacation.

I do have faith that career will sort this shit out for me in due time and that it will be in enough time that I won't take another medical on it.