The Last Guardian (Or, That One Time I Replaced Senate President Salonga's Printer Cartridge.)

Another hero, perhaps the last real hero of the age - Senate President Jovito R. Salonga - is gone. There is always loss when your idols die - but when you get to know them through their work, you grasp blindly, desperately, to hold on to memory that would keep them alive. This is my favorite JRS story, my rare brush with legendary, myth-creating (and myth-deserving legend). 

During law school I was helping out his organizations - Kilosbayan/Bantay Katarungan - with research for its pleadings before the Supreme Court. I was just a law student then and could not even sign the documents I helped prepare, but he approved a suggestion to put the law students' names in a footnote in one important case. 

I remember coming in to his office in Makati one Sunday afternoon around 2007 or 2008, to attend a meeting where all those involved in drafting a pleading would go over the document line by line (something we still practice in the OSG). Anyway, I was a bit too early for the meeting and he was still preparing the version with his comments. I apologized and told him I would come back later. No, come inside my office he said. It is almost done. I don't remember much about his office (lots and lots of books), but I sure remember his PC setup: commodity hardware on an off-the-shelf computer desk - like what you would find in the corner of every office supplies shop. His installation of Word 97(?) was heavily customized - the toolbar icons were limited to the most common functions, and the document was zoomed in to high levels of magnification by default.

He made me sit by the side of his work table while he tapped away at the keyboard and operated the mouse to change the formatting of his paragraphs. No imperious dictation to a secretary. No fancy pens and stationery. No ceremony. Here was a hero of Plaza Miranda, a hero of the revolution, grinding away with the workday tools of any junior associate. He declared the document finished and then printed it himself, working through the print selection and print preferences dialogues. Some of the pages came out blurred - it was time to replace a couple of printer cartridges. At this point he acknowledged the limits of his ability to deal with the machines and asked me if I could replace the cartridges myself - most of the support staff were gone for the weekend. I did the whole thing as matter-of-factly as I could, but I was actually afraid that the shaking in my hands would unmount the whole printer head assembly. If he had told me to reassemble the whole thing into a Volt machine, I would have probably tried in earnest. He watched the whole process - from cartridge installation to printer recalibration. And then he went through the printer dialogue again - but this time changing the page range settings to print only the blurred pages. Because you know, efficiency. The End.