OPINION

Maintain phone rage

Re: "NBTC gets tough on mobile phone signals", (Business, June 22).

Sock it to 'em, NBTC. How many times have I and others called the Dtac centre, (and others to their carriers as well), only to be told, "Our engineers will look into it," and the same garbage persists year in, year out, with no remedies. I doubt the qualifications of these engineers if it is taking them years to fix simple problems. I also doubt if engineers exist at all, except in Dtac's imaginative repertoire of excuses to mollify customers.

So, NBTC, go at these people for all it's worth. They make a fortune, but provide minimum quality service, and they don't care because, between Dtac, AIS, True and one or two other minor players, there is no choice at all. Perhaps a class action suite is what's really needed, but this is Thailand, and people continue to pay, and it will always be mai pen rai. Silence is golden.

One of the recurring laments of expatriate retirees in letters to PostBag is that they are not legally allowed to do volunteer work, such as teaching English at the local orphanage school.

All of these letters fall on deaf ears, because they do not offer the bureaucrats any quid pro quo for giving up some of the control they have over our lives and what we do with our spare time. I suggest overcoming this impasse by Thai authorities introducing a "retiree volunteer work permit". This has many attractions for the bureaucratic mind.

First of all would be the creation of a new form -- perhaps even two forms -- an application form and a security clearance form. We all know how bureaucrats love forms, especially, in Thailand, hard copy forms. Imagine the fun they could have at our expense in knocking the applications back because we had forgotten to cross a "t" or dot an "i" or had forgotten to fill in our maternal grandmother's maiden name.

Of course, there would be a fee, so that is another plus for the bureaucracy.

I would imagine the processing time would be in the order of two weeks, but I am sure an "express" service could be facilitated by a bit of the folding stuff inserted between the pages of the application. Of course, all of this entails extra work, so the department charged with administering and issuing these would be justified in seeking extra staff, facilities and budgets, with upgrades of key posts because of the added responsibilities.

So it would be a win-win for both sides.

Regarding the recent severe flooding in Bangkok, about three to four months ago the city replaced all the water drainage covers on our soi.

To my amazement they made the drainage holes smaller and fewer in number in the covers.

A first grader could predict what would happen next.

While we used to have some mild flooding during downpours, after the heavy downpour on Tuesday, it's now worse than ever.

In addition the entire length of the soi is now flooded, and six hours later (instead of the usual one or two), the water remains and still isn't draining properly.

I'm fairly certain it's the same all over the city where covers were replaced.

I wonder what engineering genius thought up this flood-making, water-blocking system?