ONLY in Manila, they say, is cigarette sold by the stick by vendors deftly scurrying around vehicles caught in traffic jams.

There’s a boom on stores selling old clothes, second-hand shoes and used motor engines and appliances rescued from Japan’s teeming junkyards.

Even notarial service is being dispensed by lawyers sitting on stools by the sidewalk, batting out legal documents on portable typewriters perched on their knees.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that we still see many shops with a battery of private phones laid out near the door for rent at P5 per three-minute call. Many shops earn enough from phone calls to cover their rent.

This call-retailing business is competing with the public pay phones (some of them now accept call cards) which cannot meet the demand because they are few and usually out of order.

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PRIVATE phones being rented out caught critical eyes last week when the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. announced its plan to carry out next month its call-metering scheme to cut down, it said, on telebabad.

Telebabad is the colloquial for calls that drag unnecessarily too long. “Babad” is the vernacular for “soak,” as in a rag or a stick soaked over a long period in water.

But while the end is laudable, protestors from affected sectors said the means sought to be employed—which is to meter all calls and impose a surcharge over a maximum limit — is a crude and arrogant display of monopolistic muscle.

Overseas calls and Internet connections for chatting and email are among those to be severely affected.

There are other ways to discourage telebabad without infringing on a people’s basic freedom of speech and overburdening a captive clientele without commensurate improvement in service.

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ON top of the regular monthly rate of almost P600 being collected from home users, the PLDT wants to impose an additional charge of 10-40 centavos per minute in excess of the 26 minutes that it would allot each day to a subscriber!

Obviously, the PLDT will make a killing since most of its subscribers — particularly business offices — cannot live with just 26 minutes of phone talk each day.

The public suspects that PLDT’s objective is not really to cut telebabad but to rake in more profits.

It’s incredible that the National Telecommunications Commission approved the phone-metering scheme without a quantitative/qualitative statistical study and an honest public hearing.

Reacting to the howl of protest, President Estrada has promised to stop the metering plan, although we assume that this is only until its proponents are able to rationalize it.

The PLDT has had to pedal back and promised to study the scheme further. But its dark intentions are out in the open.

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PHONE companies did not spring up, nor were they granted franchises, to indulge in basic research or to invent a newfangled phone system. The appropriate technology is there, and all they are expected to do is acquire it, install it, and make money off it.

If a phone company does it right, and it should, there would not be these problems of wrong numbers, continually dead phones, cross lines, no dial tones, et cetera ad nauseam.

All that phone companies have to do is buy the technology and the equipment. If they don’t have the money, or are relying on collections to raise the bulk of the needed capital, they have no business applying for a franchise in the first place.

As it is, subscribers are fried in their own fat, and still are subjected to insult and abuse.

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THERE is also the serious matter of some phone executives reportedly buying inferior equipment and milking their own companies through overpricing and excessive commissions.

Second-quality equipment thus finds itself into the system and causes those problems that the phone company then blames on subscribers who allegedly overuse their phones.

Even their repair crew complains of the unusually high rate of breakdowns because of substandard equipment.

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THE sycophants of President Estrada should rein in their flattery. Erap might start believing he is indeed a world statesman. Or at least a regional leader of bloated stature.

In fact, the President should give the Anwar bit a little rest. He has said more than enough in sympathy with Anwar Ibrahim, the ousted deputy minister of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.

He should look inward and devote more time to domestic problems. As it is, the 100-day honeymoon is long gone, the bills have started to come in and we haven’t even started to sort out the big pile in the bedroom.

What did Erap Para sa Mahirap say about providing jobs and stopping crime? His promises seem like faint echoes in the past. What did he say about banning friends and relatives in government? That now sounds as improbable as Einstein’s theory of relatives.

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FOR a while, Mr. Estrada’s Singapore jaunt and his Anwar verbal shots across the Malacca straits were good copy. To the mob resting outside our own Bastille, they were a respite, actually a distraction.

Like Bill Clintoris finding distraction in foreign affairs, particularly by hurling war threats at poor scapegoats like Saddam of Iraq, our dear Erap was able to change the topic in Manila when he hied off to Singapore weeks ago to read his script on world economics.

Mr. Estrada was lucky that his overactive critics were able to condition everybody to expect a bumbling recitation. Paraphrasing my favorite anti-gravity advocate, there was no other way for Erap to go but up.

Now some members of the Polk Street troupe are floating the seductive idea that having wowed ‘em in Singapore, Mr. Estrada should embark on a road show a la Marco Polo (aka Fidel Ramos) and speak before forums across the globe.

That’s neat: the President travels and the boys get to travel too, again at taxpayers’ expense.

If Mr. Estrada bites the bait, or if the travel bug bites him, the tribe of the mahihirap will increase and the Estrada regime will have to change its slogan to “Para sa Pahirap.”