mr. julio tesoro

I first saw this man way back in the late 80’s when I was still an editor of a state university student paper. Our staff usually spent sleepless nights in the printing press rushing the editing and finalizing our paper to beat the deadline. He was the man whom we saw inside Tesoro’s printing office silently checking on us tinkering and punishing their expensive mac computers’ keyboards trying to make crash courses learning pagemaker.

He would stop for a second or two to look… then would be gone inside one of the building’s rooms. We later learned he lived there pala. Then he would be back to check again, a routine he regularly did before he going to bed. Maybe  wanted to make sure we were not making their typing office messy…or deleting files,   (I remember one time when we accidentally deleted a whole tabloid’s page contents and we all went “amnesiac” the moment the mad typist asked who deleted the files.) But I wanted to think that even if he never knew our names, he was more concern about us than the macs every time he did those hourly checks.

I never knew his name until I heard from a friend who works in the printing told me that he passed away. It was then I saw his picture in a local daily. In the picture, he never grew old. I was certain he was the man I saw inside the printing press almost three decades ago.

I really wanted to drop by on his wake. I wanted to silently say how grateful I was for his silence (which I thought was patience) during his routine checks. I wanted to say I learned to love and enjoy the world of “printing” because of the freedom he gave us during those press works.

It took me almost three decades to say how grateful I was for those “silence” but better late than never saying it at all.  I sincerely say thank you for your patience and silence.  I learned many thins form them. It was nice knowing you, sir…