A slow news day

Some people think journalists are cops. And I can’t say I blame them because some reporters on the crime beat get confused sometimes as to which side of the police line they’re supposed to be.

Sometimes people would come up to me, on learning what I do for living, and see if I could help get the rusty wheels of justice rolling for their particular predicament, just by writing about it.

Sometimes, they’d have a valid issue, which usually means it’s one that could be of interest to the public.

But sometimes…

Well, I’ll tell you about this one slow Saturday, when I came into the GMANews.TV office for the afternoon shift. I was just booting up my computer when the phone rang.

It was a guy with a complaint: His sister had been stood up by an Australian she had been chatting with over the Internet for months.

As you may have guessed, they fell in love and the guy promised to marry his sister. In fact, he was supposed to fly in that very afternoon to meet the whole family, to get to know them and make the wedding arrangements.

So they rented a jeepney and sped off the airport to welcome the prospective groom.

They waited and waited and waited, but the guy didn’t show up.

He did finally call the sister on the cellphone and said something had come up. So why don’t they just meet up in the hotel he was staying in Ermita.

So they sped off to the hotel. But was the guy there?

To quote the late great Gary Cooper: Nope.

He didn’t even have a reservation – not in the name he gave the sister anyway.

And that was why the girl’s brother decided to call for help, noting how much they had spent for the jeepney and how distraught his sister was and so on – and all for nothing.

Of course, it just had to me at the other end of the line.

So what was I supposed to do?

I know, maybe I’d track down the guy myself and make a citizen’s arrest. And if he resists? Well, I’m afraid I’m just going to have to stun him with a cliche.

“You gonna haul my ass in with that pen?”

The guy, naturally, would have a Crocodile Dundee accent, and he’d be smirking like Jack Nicholson and flexing muscles that would have scared Arnold Schwarzenneger.

“Well,” I’d say, my voice as cool as James Bond’s martini, “you know of course that the pen is mightier than the sword.”

No. I don’t think I could have pulled that off, not even if I sounded like Sean Connery.

Actually, at this point, I was wondering what could have happened.

Maybe the Australian was a prankster who liked elaborate practical jokes that spanned two countries.

Or maybe it was like An Affair to Remember in reverse: Maybe the guy got run over by a pedicab or something.

Or maybe he just got cold feet.

At any rate, not being a lawyer, I couldn’t figure out what charges they’d press on the guy, if it should come to that.

But I couldn’t be sarcastic with this caller.

I was well aware that it was not Alex the average guy with a slight hangover he was talking to but Alex a Web site editor of one of the most respected TV networks in the country.

I had to be polite and patient, which wasn’t so hard because, as I said, it was a slow day for news.

So I asked the caller if they had gone to the police, and as I had expected, he said no.

I said why don’t they first go on over to Station 5 of the Manila Police, which has jurisdiction of the hotel where the incident took place (or, actually, did not take place).

“And if they give you the runaround,” I said, “I’d pull a lot of strings all over the city and see that their heads roll and stuff each one up their big, fat…”

Of course, I didn’t really say that. First of all, we were talking in Tagalog. And it’s just not me to say such things.

But on such a slow day, it would have been a relief to talk like a tough, cigar-chomping editor like Lou Grant.

And it would have impressed the caller too.

But as it happened, he sounded a bit disappointed, though relieved that he could at least tell someone of his sister’s misadventure. He thanked me and hung up.

I don’t know if they actually took my advice, but if they did, I bet the cops over at Station 5 had a more eventful afternoon than I did.

© ATM

[This piece was first published in the Blogs section of the GMA Network website on November 25, 2009.]