Trouble in The Office

LOVE STORY

The conference room was booked last Wednesday for our group's despidida to a well-loved manager, Walts (who was not really from our team -- he's under Corporate, so that means he's one of them bigshot directors). Silver-haired Walts was never one for despididas. After being the latest casualty of the global "delayering" a.k.a. layoffs, he intentionally took his lunches out of office, which wasn't normal of him to do. He says he just wanted to exit quietly... That's just the way he is, he said. We all sense that the "delayering" must have made a deep cut in him, especially when he knew he could still offer so much for the Office.

While we all sat down to tuck in the lunch meals we ordered from nearby North Park, questions wove in and out of the conversations. And I did notice that most of the questions came from me, probably because I must have been more affected than I thought I was.

I asked him whether he was happy with the package the company offered. "It could have been better," he replied. Then I asked where he was heading off in the days following. He said he and his wife Cynthia would be exploring Northern Luzon and then the U.S. ... and then, without warning, he began to tell us how he and his wife met.

"Did I ever tell you how my wife and I met? It's a pretty interesting story. We lived in the same subdivision -- her house was only three houses away from ours, but somehow we never met. In that time, there weren't any computers. We used typewriters," he looked at us to check if we knew what typewriters were. Of course, we knew, we told him.

"Ours was the only typwriter in the whole street, and so whenever anybody needed a typewriter, they would ask to borrow ours, and I would just lend it to them. It became like common property among the neighbors, except Cynthia. I guess she didn't have any need of it while she was younger.

"One day, the cook who worked in the home which was three houses from ours came up and asked if she could borrow the typewriter for her young charge. So I lent it. No big deal. My typewriter gets borrowed all time, and then I forgot about it. After a few days I had to get something typed that I looked for it around the house. And there I saw it with the cover still on. I lifted the cover and saw a small note stuck on the keys. It said 'Thanks! -- Cynthia.'

"I said to myself, 'Ok ito ah.' Everybody else who borrowed my typewriter didn't even bother to say any thing. Ni ha, ni ho.

"The next time Cynthia's cook borrowed it again, I stuck a small note like the way she did, saying 'You're welcome! -- Walts' instead. In time, the typewriter came back and forth between Cynthia and me, and the notes grew longer and longer. And all that time we were passing the typewriter, we still did not meet."

We had to ask him if still had the notes.

"I still have them," he smiled. The girls in the room exploded into "Awwww.... that's soooo sweeeetttt!!!!!"

He shifted his seat to signal the story wasn't finished yet. We kept it together and let him continue.

"As I was driving my car out of the subdivision, I saw a girl who was walking toward me, the opposite direction. I thought, 'Sya ba yun?' I drove pass her still asking the same question to myself. I decided to stop, drive reverse, and then I asked her, 'Are you Cynthia?'

"And you know what, she said she was. I introduced myself, Hi, I'm Walts, I'm the typewriter guy...

"To make the long story short, we spent a lot of time together, and I courted her. The day she said Yes to me was at a church after we walked the whole day from Phase I to Phase III in BF. (That's a long walk!). That was on December 22, and every 22nd since that day, she would get a rose and a letter from me. And I would have a letter from her as well."

The rest of us in the conference room, single and married, were just shrieking kileg and envious of the match. We couldn't believe it could happen in real life, and there he was, a living testament that romance and serendipity do exist.

"You know," he said,"Mondays are the hardest days for us. We couldn't stand to be away from each other, especially after we've had a wonderful weekend. Remember the time I had to fly to Shanghai? She was crying when she drove me to the airport. I would be gone only three days, but... it was really really difficult. What I did for the times we couldn't be together was that I wrote a letter for every day we'd be apart. And I would call her, wherever I was, every single day.

"Since I am among friends naman, and I hope it doesn't go out of this room (hahaha), I could have been in a higher position that this last one. I actually had other options, but the one criteria Cynthia and I looked at was, if it had anything to do with 'Travelling A Lot,' then, sorry, not for us. We really value each other; our time together is the most precious thing we have."


The lunch break extended past two o'clock, and we had to get up, leave the room, and say our goodbyes to Walts. And I had to ask him one last thing before he had to go, "Did you ever imagine to have this kind of bond between you and your wife?"

"Frankly," he turns to me, "no. I guess I was just really really lucky." He smiles and gives me a hug. I kiss him on the cheek and say I miss him already.

Bye, Walts. I hope the world has more of the likes of you.

posted by Elyss @ 11:23 PM