The Panganibab-Se Nuptial Photo Coverage

The photo coverage of the recent Panganibab-Se nuptial proved lousy as the pictures came in a large brown envelope a year and a day after the actual ceremony. No one even saw anyone deliver it. The bride’s mother Mrs. Se’s housemaid just found it in the mailbox one day. A message was attached to it, written on a yellow Post It™ and scribbled with blue ballpoint pen. It was neither signed nor dated. “Lousy photo coverage, sorry,” was all it said.

The housemaid immediately handed it over to Mrs. Se, who, upon digesting the implications of this postal delivery, uttered an impassioned, clear, and highly audible string of curses in her native tagalog, and only for a couple of times in her husband’s Fukienese.

“What do you expect me to feel, p******na?” she asked the rest of her family, who all had gone out of their rooms, roused by the disturbance. “Here, finally, are Marga’s wedding pictures. And they are all lousy.”

Driven not as much by an interest to verify if the pictures were indeed lousy than by a simple want to see the pictures they ought to have seen at least a year ago, the family went to see the pictures. It wasn’t until they had actually opened the envelope (for Mrs. Se had placed the pictures back in it, and had closed it), and inspected the photographs that they came to the conclusion that they were indeed lousily taken.

For one, all the angles were bad—all of them. For another, on all those shots, the photographer had apparently forgotten that the cap of his camera’s lens wasn’t completely off. This reduced the pictures to mere halves of what could have been only the bad-angled photographs that they were.

Rage that could only be comparable to that felt by Mrs. Se exploded in her family of eight. The housemaid showed a bit of her own outside-the-family anger herself, if somewhat calmer, the housemaid never one to let emotions get in the way of effectively serving this family for at least until the end of her work shift for the day.

It was William Robert, 25, who made the brilliant suggestion 3.5 minutes later that they should seek out the photo coverage people responsible for this blunder and file a lawsuit against them or something.

It must have made sense, because for awhile it seemed that the storm of the family’s mostly verbal fury abated. Chaad, who was a second year Law student enrolled in L* S**** Taft, said, “Yes. In fact, I’m thinking the same thing. Let’s haul their asses to court. I have Powerful Friends!”

No one paid attention to him.

Instead, Mrs. Se went to the phone. “Do you think Marga’s at work this early in the morning?” she asked her family. “She has to hear about this.”

A glance at the Time-Time living room wall clock told Serilla, the youngest daughter, that perhaps not yet. “Perhaps not yet,” she mused aloud for her family to hear. “Try her car phone.”

“But where she works it’s prohibited to use mobile phones in the street,” interrupted Isoppro, one of the sons. “I guess we’ll have to wait till she gets to the office.”

“Try her home phone in any case,” said Pampy, one of the daughters.

Mrs. Se did, and when she got her daughter, Marga, on the other end of the line and learned what her daughter had to say to her instead, she wished they never should have received the envelope of the Panganibab-Se nuptial photo coverage pictures that day.

And so they fired the housemaid.

© Jay Santos 2003.