By Jan Vicente B. Pekas
I have always tried to appreciate our teachers in elementary that tried to hold more activities outside the classroom. It could just be a simple act of writing on our papers outside, but even that was a thousand times better than just being stuck inside a room for hours on end. This has helped developed within me the feelings to despise being stuck inside a classroom for hours straight. These days, the activities that I truly enjoy are those that involve going outside for once, and interacting with the parts of the world, not just your teacher in front and classmates to the sides.
But as I have come to learn, even these activities outside the classroom has its own set of challenges. It’s fun to be more involved with what our society could offer, but that means getting to know more about government bureaucracy and its snail-like function speed. The countless letters to be signed by all sort of authorities with their countless titles and roles. All these must be skirted through, followed-up on, and worked on so much for countless day that even a bit of progress in a single day is the most progress you can get in a week.
Now that we are so close to walking out those doors and into society, much of our times almost all spent dealing with the government paper works and requirements. Achieving just an inch of progress every week, and if we get lucky we could even time our arrival perfectly into their offices and catch the person in charge actually inside the building.
As we wade through our thesis subject, it has become clear that the hardest part is not the writing of the thesis itself but dealing with the roadblock that dealing with government offices offer. We are still a long time from actually getting into the harder parts of our study but here we are, stuck waiting for a piece of paper that will never arrive within our expected timeline. And so long as that paper is not in our hands, then we are stuck playing with our thumbs, left to watch the time go by and let bureaucracy do its slow work.
All the time lost and the amount of progress we could have accomplished at this time, all of it remain a fleeting what if, and only the reality created by the system is what remains. The frustrating part is to have your effort not be the one dictating the progress of your work, but whenever the government offices allow you to move forward, bit by bit, inches worth of progress for only this week.
All this protocol and requirements that students must go through and we aren’t even looking for jobs yet, how long will that process take?
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