Know If You Have Work or School
This was one of my dilemmas when I was in my college. I did not know if we had classes or not. Here in the Philippines, you have to wait for the official announcement of any of the following institutions:
- You school or office (of course)
- DepEd / CHED (the education institutions)
- Malacañang (from the country’s president)
Note that PAGASA (the agency that tracks the weather and other geographic/meteo thingy) is not included in this list. The institutions above asks for advice from PAGASA but it doesn’t make the official statement.
So you have a lot of sources and these institutions do not have a page dedicated for declaring if school or work is suspended because of a holiday, typhoon or national disaster. Sure the media websites are there but sometimes the announcement gets buried under “more important” news like killings or corruption in the government. It’s 6:00 AM and we want to know if we can get back to sleep or do we need to prepare so that we wouldn’t miss the magic school bus.
Conveniently, we have this website, named may pasok ba? (roughly translated as “Is there school or work?”). Whoever was the first to share this website in my circle of friends, kudos. You can’t miss the announcement. It’s in Arial with a 161 font size. It’s just in plain Meron (Have) or Wala (Don’t have). I’m not saying we rely on this website completely but I think it’s around 70-80% reliable. The best source of course is an official announcement from your school or office.
Side Story
There’s also a website called, May Bagyo (translated as “There’s Typhoon”). The other name of the website is Typhoon2000. It’s a cool website in a geeky way and it’s maintained by David Padua (one of the smart guys in my home town, Naga City). Storm reports, tracking data, and even satellite photos of the typhoon are there. The web master gathers the data in the website–most coming from other storm tracking agencies local and global.
One of my geeky hobbies is tracking big storms in the country, waiting for the eye of the storm to pass over my location. I love being in the eye of the storm. It makes me feel like I’m in those end of the world zombie games.
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