Today was supposed to be nice...as in a nice lunch with Michael & Thuyen, which was not the case. The day started out as yuck! It rained most of the morning, giving me migraines, so call me Grumpy. Since Zen was closed for lunch we walked over to Korea House Restaurant. Lunch was so-so since I had my heart set on Zen. So as we were walking out to the car, Hermes (our driver) backed the car up and was waiting for us just ahead. From my left comes this maintenance guy in a golf cart speeding down & TEXTING mind you...head down looking at his phone and not paying attention to where he was going. I yelled for him to stop but too late. The back of my car stopped him. He slammed into my poor car!!! Pretty good damage for even a small cart. Of course the cart driver said his break was not working and I said of course not since you were texting and that shut him up. Needless to say we were the center of attention since everyone had to come by and check out the commotion. Seems like there is nothing better for anyone to do or places to be. It took about an hour just to get his sup over and then the cart driver started apologizing to me in Tagalog, I am guessing trying to apologize so that he will be forgiven and won't have to pay for the damages since he said he has no money....mute since I am not a Filipina. And yeah I forgave him but I sure hell am not going to pay for the damages that he caused. Up until now I wasn't fretting too much since I know our car leaser JC will take care of everything & make it all go away...his father is a very influential judge in Makati/Manila. Heck anytime the so called police tries to give us tickets for bogus reasons we get JC on the phone and hand it over to the police and before you know it the police is apologizing to us for stopping us...now THAT is power! Anyway, Michael had to cancel his meeting so time was lost due to stupidity. Once the CDC police (5) came it was pretty clear to me that they were going to gang up on us. I mean there were about 12 men on one side of the road & us 4 on the other. I want to be fair in making assessment of the situation but I felt it was clearly divided...us against them. The CDC didn't even come ask us what happened, took the statement from the cart driver & interrogated Hermes. They saw an opportunity to make $$ or was in favor of trying to help the cart driver from any wrong-doing, even though we were the injured party but unfortunately for them we had surprises of our own (car was leased & we had our own ammo).We felt like we were on the defensive mode and then I was like oh yeah let's bring in our guys...so Michael called Dino, TI Head of Security (ammo), and had him sent his two supvs for reinforcement since I was not liking the way the investigation was going. I had a sneeky suspicion that was what they were trying to do since the CDC police wanted to have my driver go give his statement @ their office and they were interrogating Hermes as if he was the party @ fault. Well let me tell you, that was not going to happen on my watch. I told the TI security supvs to accompany him for backup if not for anything else. I am sure all those filipino guys (CDC & crew) love me...especially when they are not accustomed to a very opinionated female like myself;-) About 4 hrs later & them trying to pin it on Hermes, I got a txt from Hermes that the cart driver finally admitted that he was in the wrong; apologized to JC on the phone and his fines were reduced. He's lucky it was JC & not me. So everything was settled and no worries for us except the poor car will be showing her bruises for awhile. She won't be going to get a facelift anytime soon since we only have her for 1 month. Lesson learn...regardless whether you are at fault or not, as a foreigner, you will always be in the wrong. Don't get me wrong, there are alot of good people here but unfortunately you will come across alot of rotten apples. And yet we were able to find humor in this whole ordeal...Michael asked me tonight during dine-dine:
Following convo>
Michael: What did you learn from the Philippines?
And he answers for me: That you didn't trust people before & now even more! LMAO
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