Mang Joe

We should all live life well. Everyone would have different interpretations of that cliché. I know a gentleman (perhaps not many would refer to him as such) who lived life very well. Let me simply call him Mang Joe, as many people called him. I will intentionally miss out on many of the details as they will only clutter the simplicity of this gentleman.

His father, a carpenter from Marinduque, had more children than he could feed and he entrusted Joe to a lady whom the boy would call Lola. It amuses her to recall that when Mang Joe came to her home, he was wearing a rather short shirt exposing his belly. He was very young, around nine or ten years old, naive of the city and in many other things. His only treasure was a picture of a boat, one of those with a wooden hull, which he proudly declares that his father helped build.

His Lola taught him moral and spiritual values and while his Lolo, a stern disciplinarian, taught him the value of work. “It is not important what work one does,” his Lolo would say “As long as that is what God wants him to do and he does it to the best of his ability, he is a successful man.”

But like any growing boy, he was attracted to playing at the neighborhood billiard hall. He also went to school but he did not keep at it and he did his share of barkada which taught him to drink and smoke, but there was something good in the young Mang Joe that brought him close to good people.

A religious sister offered him a job as janitor for the parochial school. Again, it amused his Lola when he resigned after a year or so. He complained that he never got to finish his job cleaning the yard since leaves keep on falling from the acacia tree.

Because his Lolo suffered from a cataract operation and cannot drive, he returned to them, this time as the family driver. Thus Mang Joe started a profession as a driver.

Remembering Things

In this digital age of account numbers and passwords, we recall an old technic to improve our way of remembering things. Monico Atienza, my professor in Motion and Time Study introduced us to an acronym which sounded silly then but has been a good servant to me in carrying out any work.

Mr. Dopa stands for: (1) Make Ready; (2) Do; and (3) Put Away. These are the three parts that make up any work to be done..

Then there was this Mack Truck Service Representative giving a service training program who said the firing order of six cylinder engines is either 1-5-3-6-2-4 or 1-3-5-6-4-2 and to make sure there are no errors he suggested adding 153 and 624 or 135 and 642, either of which comes out 777.

Over the years, I have met so other mnemonic devices. I learned this resistor color code mnemonic from my Pacific Office Machines service technicians: “Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Violeta Gives Willingly” stands for: 0 Black; 1 Brown; 2 Red; 3 Orange; 4 Yellow; 5 Green; 6 Blue; 7 Violet; 8 Grey; and 9 White

The medical profession has many risque mnemonics. Thanks to a good friend, then a medical student, this is one of them: “Oh Oh Oh To Touch And Feel A Girl's Vagina Aah Heavenly” for Olfactory, Optic, Occulomotor, Trochlear, Trigeminal, Abducent, Facial, Auditory (aka vestibulocochlear or acoustic), Glossopharyngeal, Vagus, Accessory, Hypoglossal nerves.

Hardware stores and other small shops use their own codes to mark the price tag. The following are examples:

Black Stone for 12345 67890. Thus, a code of CNKE stands for 49.50

Eating Much for 012345 6489. Thus, 49.50 in this code will be NHGE.

Photo: "Business by the River" by Olivier Agustin