Confused of Cubao

[emjay]

Time to renew the annual vehicle tax in the Philippines - no problem, amble along to the closest Land Transport Office (LTO) well stocked with snacks, water bottles and reading material. The process is modeled on a seemingly endless set of micro steps - go to window N, collect form, fill in form, deposit at window M with payment, get told to sit and wait for your name to be called.

Due diligence is done, snacks consumed, patience held. Oops - red flagged. Your reference number (taken directly from last year's printout) is not in the computer - go to window Z in the other building.... Do as you are told to find now familiar faces in the same queue for window Z.
Shuffle forward and present last year's receipt - a few keystrokes later into what looks very much like an Excel spreadsheet and a different reference number is scrawled in biro on your receipt. Retrace steps and rejoin previous micro stepping routine - plenty of time to chat with your new found queue mates.

Turns out 'everyone' knows the problem - some mega database conversion was done during the year and curiously the same primary key was not used. However, some undisclosed algorithmic mapping from old key to new is possible. Instead of a simple batch run of a few lines of SQL to add the old key as secondary, each applicant obtains the mystery value for manual entry. This supposedly was done on purpose since the original dataset is peppered with dubious "fixed for a fee" entries.

Next step - emissions certificate. Ok, that must be easy, I noted a small hangar-like construction when driving in to the LTO carpark proudly displaying an "EMISSIONS TESTING" banner. Hmm - that's just a decoy - the real test place is a few blocks away in the centre of town.
Rejoin the appalling traffic and reach the place in 30 minutes - fight for a parking slot (warning sign #1), find and fill the form, join the waiters (no seats left - warning sign #2). Name called and find the clipboard man - very courteously adds us to the list on the yellow pad, #88
Hmm - wow, they must be efficient here to process so many in a day. Sadly no - invited to come back tomorrow, but early since it's a clean sheet on the yellow pad then.

Some negotiations take place and we get squeezed in much higher on the list.

Now here is my confusion. Our turn comes and we back the vehicle up. No rolling road, just a patch of dusty tarmac. Probe inserted in a suitable orifice, engine left running at idle for 12 minutes. Monitoring box of magic spits out a slip of paper like an ATM receipt, pay the fee and move to the next step. Ok, it is a gas engine not diesel but surely the critical emission time is under heavy load? Is the idle value representative of what a loaded engine throws out the back? And twelve minutes to collect a valid sample? A couple of minutes to settle down ok, but twelve?

Any engine emission wizards out there?

[Capetonian]

That convoluted process reminds me of when, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a friend and I went to buy train tickets from the Berlin Zoo station in the east, to Frankfurt.

...... At the railway station, resplendent with 'Deutsche Reichsbahn' insignia, we purchased tickets for our escape from this strange land metamorphosing from years of the deadly grip of communism.

Two tickets for a domestic journey in almost any other country would have been a three minute transaction in which one person would have given us information, issued tickets, made reservations, and taken our money. Here, under communist job protection, the work of one person was performed by twelve.

It all began with a woman who drew a numbered ticket from a machine, explained that this represented our turn, the number of which would be held up by a man with a stack of cardboard numbers. When our turn came, she told me, we could go to the 'Auskunft und Fahrplan' window to ask the times of the trains to our destination. I told her we already knew which train we wanted. She glared at me and walked off. As our number came up I went directly to the 'Reservation' window. My arm was almost wrenched from its socket (I am sure this is how the East German weighlifters trained for the Olympics) as she dragged me to the 'Auskunft' window, to obtain information that I already had. This exercise in futility took several minutes, after which I was given another numbered ticket for my turn at the 'reservation' window. The process was repeated for each successive part of the process. There was a ticket window, at which you presented the reservation slip, a payment window at which you presented the slip confirming that the ticket had been issued, a cashier's window where you paid, with an adjacent window where another clerk issued a receipt, and the grand finale was going back to the reservation and ticket windows with the receipt, in order to collect the prize of the ticket and reservation. By the time the process was completed, we would have had about three seconds to catch the train.

As things turned out, the train was late, which meant that by the time we got to Hanover, where we had to change for Frankfurt, we would have missed our connection had that not also been fortuitously late. We tried to board it, along with a number of passengers from other delayed trains. This caused chaos, and the Germans, those masters at efficiency and punctuality, had no idea how to handle this most unusual situation. Many cross words were exchanged, threats of 'supplementary charges' were made, and pretending to speak no German was ineffective as the train conductors all spoke perfect English.

Somewhere, I still have the unpaid 'Zuschlagstrafe' for the difference.

The thing about the engine pollution test seems absurd - no wonder Manila, at least, is so horribly polluted.

[Slasher]

During a nightstop in Bombay we were waiting for the pub van to pick us up outside a big mall where we enjoyed a bawdy comedy club. The van could only legally pick us up at a nearby bus stop.

In the mass of thick nasty belching vehicle street smoke my F/O lit up a quick ciggy while we waited. A cop rolled up and reminded him that bus stops in India are designated no smoking areas!

[OFSO]

They stopped doing diesel pollution tests at full throttle here after too many camshaft drive belts snapped and the ITV testing stations got (unsuccessfully) sued. Emissions tests are a waste of time anyway as you can pop into any supermarket and buy a can of "pass the test" fuel additive.

[OFSO]

Got an SMS supposedly from 3 last night to "click here and reactive your account." Blocked and dumped mucho pronto.

[llondel]

California doesn't even bother with measuring anything on engines newer than about 1995, they just ask the on-board system how well it thinks it's doing. So far, no one's been fingered in a VW-style software hack for this one.

[PHXPhlyer]

llondel:
Same in AZ but only go back 5 or 6 years with no check at all. After that, emissions test at tailpipe and OBD check as well. You can cheat the OBD test by clearing faults and driving a bit before test.
Unfortunately, their software also detects if you have not driven enough to get a fair sample. They then give you a detailed driving plan, varying speeds and times, before chip will reset. Ask me how I know.
OBD reader paid for itself first time I used it and passed 2 year tests about 4 times with check engine light on before testing.
(Don't tell DMV please)

PP

[llondel]

Yes, the OBD gadgets are well worth it, I have one and it's helped diagnose a couple of issues.