Creepy

No good deed goes unpunished.

Tell that to the young man who braved filthy torrents of monsoon flood to help carry stranded people to safe ground and warm, well-lit establishments. After his services, not one of those he assisted offered to give him even a cup of hot coffee to stave away the cold and the tremendous fatigue of carrying humans to safety. The only warmth he got, if ever, was the warmth of salamat and similar spoken graces.

Some people need more than salamat to get by. Take for example our pedicab drivers, who saw a lot of action during the recent flooding of Metro Manila. Taft Avenue’s pedicab drivers are popular with the students who see their illegal, unregulated fares as exceedingly high, bordering highway robbery. But when the canal systems overflow and the water level climbs, the pedicab turns into the Taft ferry, and the ferryman’s smile is just as big as the profit he racks in.

But they still help, don’t they?

If you arrive at the LRT-1 Vito Cruz station with your feet in flashy flip-flops and recently done nails, you’d be wary of catching leptospirosis the moment you soak your femurs in the flood. But these mad ferrymen, whose daily hand-to-mouth existence is only marginally worse with the rain and the cold, don’t mind at all, and bring you to your dorm unit with all speed and efficiency. They get the job done, and you get home without your skin dipping in Taft sewage.

They just need an incentive.

Our world feeds on incentives. Primarily, people feed on economic incentives, or incentives which are based on cash. Everybody’s got a price, said Jessie J in a pop song characteristic of this milieu. It makes it harder to believe that good things can be done without an apparent payment, a price, a tax.

I mean, there has to be a catch somewhere.

***

Just last week, I was in a factory in Valenzuela City, doing a documentary on Pandayan Bookstore. My group chose to feature Pandayan in a documentary because of this extraordinary sense of accountability that its employees had, according to numerous, consistent interviews. Pandayan’s kawani, or employees, admit when they lose merchandise freely, even before incident reports are filed by supervisors, and volunteer to pay up to the thousands for lost merchandise.

Considering that these kawani do not earn the highest salaries, working in distribution centers and bookstores that cater to low-income markets in Bulacan, Cavite, Tarlac, and other regions away from high-income Metro Manila, this is amazing!

So amazing, in fact, that one of my groupmates said, “It’s so creepy!” She found it creepy because the employees offered to pay thousands of pesos on their own mistake, and admitted it freely and wholeheartedly. My creeped-out groupmate said, “Ako nga, hindi ko ‘yan gagawin e, maski sa school!”

Pandayan has a lot of ‘creepy practices’. It provides housing for its employees on long-term zero-interest loans without compromising their salary. They are also very generous with leaves and benefits without demanding an increased spike in performance, which may create an environment for employee complacency.

In fact, their operations manager admits, “These practices definitely hurt our bottom line. But sometimes, you just know that what you’re doing is right.”

Knowing that a certain practice is significantly hurting your bottom line is code red for businessmen. You have to remove it, because it compromises your profit, and the salaries of employees.

But what if it’s just the right thing to do? What if it’s right to give people homes and a sense of community where they work, unfailingly, sincerely?

During the recent monsoon flooding, Pandayan employees disregarded the warnings by Pandayan’s management telling them not to leave their homes.

Pandayan’s branches in Bulacan, Valenzuela, and Caloocan were in places worst hit by the monsoon. Despite this, employees, by their own virtue, went out to the stores in the midst of severe flooding just to check if the wares, the books, and the school supplies were intact and untouched. All this without pay, against management directive, and without a direct financial incentive.

How creepy.

Many business models clash with what Pandayan is doing, which may seem ‘creepy’. Creepy things that hurt the bottom line, creepy things which don’t ‘pay off’. It is creepy to think of businesses that do not place premium on economic incentives. It just seems so out of this world.

***

Despite very telling signs that we live in an age where altruism is suspicious and where good deeds have a ‘catch’, sometimes, we just need to appreciate good things for what they are. There is always a ‘catch’, and there is always an issue, but then with those things come a good that may be trusted, that may be pure, or if not pure, then by their very nature ‘good’.

Sagip Metro is a very admirable project of DLSU, effectively mobilizing relief efforts of the Lasallian community right after the worst of the flooding. The Lasallians who hauled goods and worked to exhaustion after the post-Gener disaster are either lauded for their altruism, or accused of less noble motives. Of these I will not expound, because to the hungry receiving the aid, it will not matter.

What will matter is that they got their clean water, that they got their food, and that they received these without an election season sticker affixed. The hungry were fed, the naked were clothed. All in a day’s work, at the end of the day.

Oftentimes a salamat will not keep you warm, because it can be so easily given. And often, salamat is not the incentive for good, if there is an incentive. But the good counts in itself, ‘catch’ or no.

So will it matter if you actually had pure intentions? After all, it is creepy for people to simply do things because they are ‘right’ or are ‘good’. There must be an incentive.

The ‘creepy’ young man who braved the flood and did not ‘charge’ for helping the stranded to places of light may not have had his coffee, but there may be a deeper ‘incentive’, even if he may be suspected by others as having ‘creepy’ motives.

That deeper incentive is the gem that is mined through the refinery that is crisis. This gem has a value that is not known through its sheen (for it is rather dull) but through its mere existence. For it is mercifully rare, and priceless. That gem appears when good deeds are done by unsung heroes, who would rather not be known.

For these unsung heroes, they should note: no good deed goes unpunished.

Because the last will be first, and the first will be last.