Honesty is alive and well at NAIA

It happened at the NAIA Centennial Terminal—not too far from Terminal 3, the venue of that infamous brawl which left one popular columnist and the Naia name with a blackeye. Except that this one, my own airport incident, is cheery and definitely more inspiring—a happy mix of virtue and technology.

Early morning of Thursday, May 10, I came back home from a Guam trip with my daughter. Later that day I discovered my iPad was missing. Panic. I called PAL, Guam airport. Negative.
There’s a Find my iPad app but I have not set it up on iCloud. Dead end.

Somehow I ended up opening my Twitter account. It was created in 2009 but I started getting playful with it only in the past few days. I never really thought much of it vis-à-vis my present predicament but that’s how it is always—the last place you thought to look is where you find it. And there I found it—a Twitter message that goes “Please claim your iPad from Naia Immigration…”

Excitedly, I typed a reply to sender—a very, very grateful reply. But wait! I am the sender of the message! It’s my account asking me to claim the missing iPad! How’s that?! And then it all figured. The finder found a way to reach me through my missing device she had at hand.

Apparently, she opened the iPad, saw that I had a Twitter account—thank God it was online that time—and she typed in the message, expecting me (and rightly so) to see it when I log on to Twitter on another device. Pure Genius!

The full Twitter message read: Please claim your iPad from the Immigration Admin Office. Please call us at 8796016 and look for  Lorna Pascual or Lyka Ferrer.

I have gone back to Naia and claimed my iPad. I thank Lorna and Lyka for making us proud to be Filipinos again. This incident is less dramatic than finding and returning thousands of dollars, but it proves even more that their motivation is simply being their virtuous selves.

I wrote this letter to offer something for our countrymen to cheer for (aside from Jessica Sanchez). Also hoping that it inspires those who are beginning to think that virtue has no value anymore. It still has. And I feel it when I think about the Lornas and Lykas who insist on being upright. It would have been a simpler finders-keepers case and easy to blame on a careless owner. But not for them. And after talking to them, I got the impression that they did it willfully. Faced with incomplete details of my address on the arrival card (my fault), they persisted until  Lyka, a Twitter user, finally found a solution.

Technology does open doors. More doors, hopefully, leading to the righteous path or that aspired daang matuwid. And with more Lornas and Lykas, that road may not be too far ahead.

—HENRY LOPEZ,

aka Henry Sulit,

Passenger 16E-PR 111,

May 10, 2012,

[email protected]