The IC-Technical Services Group Community

A community, roughly defined, is a bunch of people who are somehow connected, sharing among each other the same joys and achievements, sadness and struggles, and many things-in-between.

The Technical Services Group of the Insurance Commission is one such community. Last July 4 to 6, we conducted our annual Strategic Planning where we squeezed our brains dry trying to come up with strategies on how to cope with the new national directives to streamline and shorten the turn-around time for our systems’ processes. Sounds difficult and boring?

But I’m not going into the details of the planning. I’m panning out to the culmination of the activity – a simple tribute given to our retiring comrade, Tita Ofel Castillo, Division Manager of the Statistics Division, who is retiring at 65 years old, after serving for more than three decades at the Insurance Commission.

Tita Ofel is a very endearing personality – she has an easy, open smile for everyone. Loaded with tasks related to foreign and inter-agency commitments, one never finds her rattled, but is always calm and confident. And though slowed down by a bothersome knee, she remains a trouper, never backing down from action, be it another responsibility to tackle, or a pleasure trip to enjoy

The tribute was filled with mixed sadness and joy. Tita Ofel will surely be missed. Her retirement means that some things will no longer be, that some things will have to change, that new things will take the place of the old.

Indeed, this recent Planning of the TSG is bittersweet as it might be the last not only of Tita Ofel…for if their plans do not change….it will also be the last for Ate Annie Lantican, Kuya Levy Baqui, and Vice Edel Bernales who all seem bent on retiring within the coming months.

As a community that has worked and laughed and shared our lives for years (spanning decades for most of us), and having experienced personal and professional hardships, prosperity, loving, fighting and sometimes bickering, together, the line that divides sadness and happiness, hope and hollowness suddenly blurs.

 

But life will go on and the community will go on, and the rest of us will carry on what we are supposed to do until it becomes our time to hand over our responsibilities to the younger ones. Here’s hoping that the TSG will always have that spirit that has allowed us to work, and play, and love at the same time – the spirit of being a family.

To Tita Ofel, congratulations on your retirement! Bring our prayers and best wishes as you begin a new chapter in your life!