- Ed.'s note: In 2024, during an aggressive PPP (public-private partnership) drive, the Philippine government partnered up with the massive but extremely secretive Sinauna Group of Companies to deliver a host of basic services to the Filipino people...
There I was, minding my own business, on my way to a client meeting. I vaguely noticed two high school girls who had a long seat all to themselves. They were giggling at some private joke, but I wasn't paying attention; I was fiddling with my organizer and my ears were too busy for the outside world.
Suddenly, the seat the schoolgirls were on disappeared. You can see from these photos I took that the people in the vicinity (well, some of them) were mildly surprised at the occurrence.
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They'd just vanished. And then another passenger sighed loudly and said, "There it goes again." We knew what "it" was - the strange rule the LRT had that seats would become "movable" at management's discretion, in order to manage space within the cars better.
But shouldn't it be a rule that seats should appear and disappear only while the trains aren't running? Not, say, while schoolgirls are innocently sitting on one of them, happily and innocently chatting away?
The other passengers and I spent the rest of our trip speculating about this weird system. One person said, maybe the girls were joking about something naughty, and the train management heard them and decided they weren't very funny.
Another said, she heard that the LRT was run by an earth spirit, and earth spirits take beautiful young girls with nice names when they feel like it. That was why she didn't let her daughter take the LRT. Her daughter was pretty and had a pretty name. Those pretty schoolgirls must have had pretty names, too - their parents should've known better.
The explanation I found most plausible was fairly simple: our car in our train wasn't crowded, but another car in another train was. So LRT management simply ignored the fact that there were people sitting on the seat they wanted to remove, and relocated it to another train without even checking.
I'm not making a big deal of it. The schoolgirls will turn up. Although, sadly, probably on another train. And they'll be late for wherever they're going, just because train authorities didn't care enough to check if people were still on a particular seat that needed relocating.
Part of me is hoping the girls will file a complaint. I'm just glad it didn't happen to me, because I had deadlines to meet on that day. People who take the train are often in a hurry, so I hope they fix this system soon.
It's a good system, which works to decongest cars especially during rush hour, but people shouldn't have to file any complaints.
