Telephone company priorities

Editor;

If you’ve been trying to call South Pattaya telephone numbers starting with 251 as of March 26, you probably were getting no answer. If you have one of these numbers, you probably already know there’s a problem.

Since I am one of them, I called the phone company daily starting on the 27th to find out when they could fix my line. Every day they said, “today or tomorrow”. The explanation was “Big problem. Box electric, BOOM!” On Friday the 30th, I was given a number, “189”, which I was told handles complaints of phone lines not being repaired. Calling them was a waste of time - they basically said they don’t know anything.

On Monday, April 2, I was given the number of a chief engineer who might know a realistic timeframe of when the problem may be rectified. When he got him on the phone, I asked if he spoke English, and he said, “No speak English”, and hung up on me.

I then spoke to the manager of the Pattaya central office. He explained that it is a very big problem affecting all 251 numbers, and that there are hotels with no telephone service, and that they were doing everything they could to fix the problem as quickly as possible. I asked if anything had been accomplished over the weekend. His response was, “No work Saturday and Sunday”.

My interpretation of this issue: It’s not a big priority for the phone company when phones are out of service - people just have to wait. “Mai bpen rai.” It’s ok for hotels to lose a lot of money and have no phone service for over a week, not to mention the inconvenience to hotel guests, so long as phone company employees are not inconvenienced with any departure from their usual routine.

My suggestions for the phone company: If you have a problem that may take a week or more to fix, don’t lie and say “today or tomorrow”. And get your priorities straight - if there’s a big problem and an entire exchange is out of service, put people to work evenings and weekends to fix it.

I also have a question: If my phone is out for 2 weeks, does my bill get prorated, or do I have to pay for the 2 weeks my phone didn’t work? I think I already know the answer to that one.

Hopefully the problem will be fixed by the time you read this.

J Prell

Dear Sir:

I do not wish to embroil the Pattaya Mail in a controversy about cleanliness, city hall tactics, police tactics re Pattaya City and New York City in faraway USA, but, as a New York City resident for three decades, and considering the wider implications to Pattaya of a Letter to the Editor (“If New York City can change, why can’t we?’ Pattaya Mail, April 6, 2001), I cannot let this matter lie unanswered.

First of all, the writer implies, from his first description of New York’s condition, before the present mayor took over, that a state of anarchy prevailed here. That is simply not true. Yes, the city was not as clean as it is now; yes, there was more crime; yes, there were more dog faeces on the streets. However, these matters are rather relative.

The city has become cleaner, safer. (On a personal level, as a gay man living in a largely homophobic country, I have always had to watch my back, in the past and also in the present. That has not changed and, maybe, never will.)

However, all these changes have come at a vast price, largely to its majority non-white population. The police, under directions from the mayor, have enforced extremely aggressive tactics resulting in a number of innocent people being killed or brutalized at the hands of the city’s police force.

To give you a few examples, a Haitian immigrant was arrested - purely on suspicion, and completely innocent - taken to a police precinct and brutalized by the arresting officer by having a broom handle shoved up his rectum; another immigrant, a slightly-built man with poor knowledge of English, was stopped by a team of white police officers who were not in uniform, and when he panicked and reached in his pocket for his building lobby key, was shot down in a hail of forty one (41!) bullets; another man, when approached by undercover officers wanting to make a drug buy and when this man angrily refused ended up being shot and dead.

There are other documented examples of overly aggressive police tactics, almost always directed against the non-white majority of this city.

While the above examples have affected a few citizens, there is a much larger policy issue also at stake: the police have been authorized to stop and frisk any citizen whom they consider suspicious. The result is thousands of arrests over a period of the past few years, almost all of them being thrown out by the courts. And the City of New York is about to settle a mass civil action brought about against it. The city will eventually pay hundreds of millions of dollars in settling these cases.

Every activist here in New York has protested these overly aggressive tactics. And the city has had to take notice and under a new commissioner of police is about to modify these policies. Moreover, the city’s police tactics have come under investigation by the federal government.

The present mayor also spent hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money defending the city against First Amendment violations brought about by the mayor’s current policies. So far, he has lost each and every First Amendment violation case in the courts.

At present, if I am ever stopped by the police and, for example, asked for identification, I have told myself that I must ask for permission to bring out my wallet, and I must reach for it in slow-motion as otherwise there is a genuine fear on my part, and of thousands of others, that the police officer will go for his gun.

Is this the kind of city that the letter-writer referred to above, wants Pattaya to be?

Yours truly,

Haresh Advani

New York City