"Sir, you don't have any load anymore," he informed me.
I was quick to reply that what he was saying was impossible because when I entered the SLEX the light at the booth lit green indicating that I still had more than P300. Also, I had just loaded P1,000 Friday, the previous week.
He butts in, "Sir, the computer says you don't have load."
I restate my case.
He persists, "But the computer said you didn't have load. That's the computer!"
At this point, while I was restating why his statement doesn't make sense, the teller hands me back my epass, and I just ignore the traffic enforcer--while he was still explaining that the computer can't be wrong--and sped off.
True enough, I checked my epass balance when I got to a computer and I still had over a thousand pesos in my account.
That traffic enforcer was either trying to swindle me into a ticket or was just plain dumb and ignorant.
Just the other week, I was arguing with my distributor staff regarding some numbers. They're not the smartest lot. Their excuse to my prodding was that my numbers were incorrect. I tried to explain to them that what they encode gets uploaded to a system and that's where I download my numbers from, therefore, we had the same numbers. They just wouldn't believe me. I had to call in our IT expert for a second opinion before we settled that my numbers were indeed correct.
They could have dug deeper to find out why we had varying data. They could have simply looked at what their reference was and compared it to what was encoded. But they didn't have the logic to figure that out. And even as I told them what to do, they didn't know how to do it. They know how to operate the computer system, they don't know what goes on under the hood.
Technology is an easy scapegoat when you are trying to imply or avoid a truth. People are quick to say, "but that's how it is," and leave it at that. No one tries to dig deeper because they don't have the diligence to do so or because they don't know that they can.
The ignorant person's approach to technology is just to believe the convenient. They just accept that it's real if it comes from an inexplicable higher power. That is ignorance. That is just pure dumb.
Two more examples: forwarded email and the recent automated canvassing.
Just because someone forwards an email doesn't mean that the content of the email is real. I was going to write that with the older generations gaining access to email, we can see where this ignorance is rooted. But I quickly realized that a lot of my peers (some even from the best colleges) forward emails like that believing that the incredible is credible.
The good thing is that with time the instances of forwarded email has decreased. It has now however been replaced with stuff like "join this Facebook group and see who is reading your profile." Again, if you know what's going on, you'll know how far from the truth that is.
Now, the recent automated canvassing.
First of all, it's an automated canvassing and not an automated election. You still had to shade, you still had to get ink for your prints, you still had to sign papers. That's not automated.
Now, when the early tally results came in, everyone was just amused about the speed of transmittal. But no one ever bothered to check for the accuracy of what was collated.
In the old system, cheating occurred in the tallying and the transmittal. Since no one understood how things were tallied, since people just trusted that technology would be correct, all the attention was on the transmittal. But how do you know that the machine counted right?
There is a very simple way to disprove the question on accuracy. It's not even remotely technological. It's manual. The random manual audit (RMA).
A day after voting, I was already asking around, including the local news services what ever happened to the random manual audit. No one knew. A few days later, the news surfaced (though I had to really look for it) that the RMA was postponed. A few days later it was started. Results started to appear. A few days more and news breaks that the RMA had been stalled.
And that was it. Up to this day, I don't think the RMA was ever completed. Everyone has conceded. It is irrelevant.
And since our useless lawmakers know nothing about technology, they all just made fools of themselves on TV as they went around in circles. Our truth commission was merely acting, the audience equally unaware.
I envy Smartmatic a lot. Sure, they seemed to have been shouted at and disparaged, but in the end they just picked the correct terms and phrased their statements well and they're off the hook. All they really clarified was what their system does. They never really answered what their system couldn't do and what could be done to it. Their system did nothing wrong. But no one ever asked if the system can be tricked into doing something wrong.
Everyone just believes what the media says. If it's a media issue, it's an issue. If the media doesn't talk about it, it's not an issue. This is also manifested in the fact that so many issues pass over. When the media hype dies, no one cares for the truth anymore.
Come to think of it, this isn't necessarily a problem raised by technology. The problem is inherently there. People are just plain ignorant.
It seems as if the truth can easily be swayed with what is convenient for the masses. Apparently, the search for truth comes to a halt at the first sign of the seemingly incomprehensible. And unfortunately, the truth is written by those who are in charge.
Truth in a way is like justice, peace, or goodness. It sometimes feels like you're fighting an impossible uphill battle to get to it.
What can you do?
The only thing you can. Explain. Try. Fight for it.
Perhaps that is your role in the world.
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