There was a story of American old west that became the plot of several movies among the first one of which that I can recall, could be that which starred Henry Fonda. Was High Noon its title? Or Gunfight At OK Corral? Anyway, since I was not a witness to the incident when it allegedly took place, what I am telling you is unmistakably hearsay and by no means do I profess to relay to you the facts as they reportedly happened.
Centered on OK Corral, it was a story of the quickest draw and dead shot gunslingers. However the gunfight was recreated by several film makers, it appeared that before all the protagonists drew their sixers (that seemed to be the way ‘cowboys’ referred to their pistols with six chambers), they were all aware that they were about to shoot one another. There was prior notice to everyone involved. Everyone was forewarned of what was coming including those who got the fatal bullets.
Here in the Philippines, and in the early morning of the day Nonito “the Filipino Flash” Donaire knocked the lights out of Mexican Jorge Arce, I unfortunately became a victim, not of a quick draw, but by an ambush. I did not know that it was coming because I was never forewarned by the Wyatt Earp which happened to be a giant telecommunications company. Here is the story.
That morning, while waiting for the pay-per-view feed of the Donaire-Arce boxing match, I received a text(ed) message from a friend who was averse to sending SMS messages. He inquired if I could be called. My quick reply was a simple “yes” hoping that he would ring my phone, now known to many as “land line”.
My friend probably could not decide whether to text me back with a rather embarrassing information or just table the idea. It indeed, took him an unusually longer period to compose a reply. When I got it, his message looked apologetic. “Sorry, your “land line” is temporarily disconnected”.
I earlier dismissed the claim of our helper whom I asked to call a regular “PPV audience” at home. Instead of telling me whether my friend was coming, she casually said that our line was “out of order”. It has my practice to call few friends to inform them of my PPV feed. That Sunday I could not call them.
It was not our inability to make outside calls that disturbed me. I was expecting a scheduled overseas call in connection with a forthcoming big event. That it could not come caused me extreme anxiety as it hurt my feelings.
The following day, I asked my office personnel to find out why the telephone company disconnected my “land line”. She was curtly told that my payment was overdue. That was it.
Yet, we had on hand a receipt for our payment. It was a receipt issued by the telecommunications firm long before our payment was supposed to be due. That receipt contained the complete details of the payment transaction. There was no way we were delayed in our remittance.
Then, the phone company came up with a weird explanation. Surely, it was an afterthought. Accordingly, they impounded our check payment because there was a writing at its back. That “writing” happened to be my name and address that our office worker made to make a quick and easy referral. From any provision of the Negotiable Instruments Law, which I happened to teach for a number of years, the entry did not, at all, affect its negotiability. Even granting that to the minds of the telco, the writing was averse to the “check”, it was not for them to decide. It was a matter that the depositary bank had to deal with and for it to do so, the telco had to deposit it.
There is something I could not understand. If the phone company imagined that my check payment was of doubtful negotiability, why did it not notify me of its imagined problem? Worse, why did it “disconnect” my service weeks after keeping my check without telling me that the negotiable instrument I gave them was no acceptable to them?
If I suffered damage, and I feel I did, it may be worth an evaluation by our courts of law. But, is it worth the hassle?