AN ARGUMENTED LEAD PROGRAMMER HUMBLED THE OLD INVENTORY STAFF INSIDE THE SERVER ROOM FOR BEING TECHNOLOGICALLY IGNORANT, BUT WHEN THEY WERE HACKED BY AN INTERNATIONAL SYNDICATE, THE INVENTORY STAFF HAD THEMSELVES SAVED THEM

It’s 3 a.m. in the office of “CyberCore Solutions,” the largest IT Security Firm in Makati. All the developers are busy with a system update for the central bank. The team leader is Kevin, a 25-year-old genius programmer. He is smart, but known for being arrogant and conceited. He sees himself as God’s gift to the world of technology.

While Kevin was coding with his high-end headphones on, Mang Berting, the 60-year-old inventory staff, came in to fix and check the equipment in the server room. He moved a bit noisily as he carried boxes and wires.

Kevin was irritated. He took off his headphones and threw them on the table.
“Sir! Can you?! You can see I’m deploying a critical patch here! You’re making so much noise!” Kevin shouted.

“Excuse me, Sir Kevin. We just need to check the equipment so that the servers don’t have problems,” Mang Berting explained calmly as he arranged the boxes.

“Check? Wow, do you know that word?” Kevin insulted while laughing. “Sir Berting, your job is to fix equipment and take inventory. Don’t be smart about our hardware. Maybe you don’t know how to turn on the computer. Get out! You’re distracting!”

Mang Berting just bowed. “Yes, Sir. Excuse me.” The old man slowly walked out carrying his things.

Kevin went back to coding. “Bwisit. Uneducated, a burden on the company,” he whispered to himself.

A few minutes passed. Suddenly, all the monitors in the entire office turned red.

ERROR: SECURITY BREACH DETECTED.

SYSTEM LOCKDOWN INITIATED.

The alarm went off. All the programmers panicked.

“Sir Kevin! There’s a Ransomware Attack! Our firewall has been breached!” shouted the Junior Dev.

“I’ll take care of it!” Kevin said arrogantly. He typed quickly. He tried to block the hacker’s IP address. But every defense he put in place, it was quickly breached.

A laughing skull logo appeared on the large screen.

“YOU HAVE 5 MINUTES TO TRANSFER $10 MILLION BITCOIN OR ALL BANK DATA WILL BE DELETED FOREVER.”

A countdown timer appeared. 04:59… 04:58…

Kevin panicked. “I can’t stop! Their scripts are so fast! They use polymorphic viruses! They change signatures every second!”

The CEO of the company, Mr. Tan, arrived, having just come from the meeting.

“Kevin! What’s going on?! Why is it red alert?!” Mr. Tan shouted.

“Sir, we’ve been hacked! The enemy is too good! Our encryption can’t handle it!” Kevin almost cried. His hands were shaking. His arrogance was gone. He knew that if the data was lost, the company would collapse and everyone would be locked up.

02:30… 02:29…

While there was chaos, the door opened. Mang Berting entered. He wasn’t carrying a box this time. He was walking straight towards the Main Terminal.

“Sir! Get out of there! Don’t interfere!” Kevin shouted. “Don’t touch the keyboard!”

Mang Berting ignored Kevin. He pushed him off the chair with force.

“Stop,” Mang Berting ordered. His voice was no longer that of an inventory staff, but that of a master commander.

Page: SAY – Story Around You | Original story.

Mang Berting sat down. His fingers, which they thought were just for holding a box and clipboard, flew over the mechanical keyboard. He wasn’t using a mouse. All he was doing was using the Command Line Interface.

Black screen with green text.

“What is he doing? He’s ruining it even more!” Kevin shouted. He was about to pull Mang Berting away but Mr. Tan stopped him.

“Wait… look at the code,” Mr. Tan whispered, his eyes widening.

Kevin looked at the screen. The syntax Mang Berting was typing was old—Assembly Language and Machine Code that are no longer taught in schools today. This is the language of computers at the lowest level.

“He’s bypassing the GUI,” a senior dev whispered. “He talks directly to the system kernel.”

00:45… 00:44…

The old man’s hand was faster than lightning. No backspace. No undo. Continuous.

“Execute Counter-Script Protocol: GHOST_01,” Mang Berting whispered.

He pressed Enter loudly.

CLACK!

Suddenly the countdown timer stopped at 00:03.

The entire room fell silent.

Suddenly the skull logo disappeared. The screens returned to blue.

SYSTEM RESTORED. THREAT ELIMINATED. IP TRACED.

“He-he fixed it…” the Junior Dev said in surprise. “He didn’t just remove the virus… he even traced where the hacker was and sent the location to the Cybercrime Division!”

Mang Berting stood up. He stretched his back as if it hurt.

“Your firewall is outdated. Port 8080 is open in the back. Please fix that before you brag again,” Mang Berting said to Kevin without emotion.

He took his equipment and was about to leave.

“Wait a minute!” Mr. Tan shouted. The CEO approached Mang Berting and bowed low.

“Sir… is that you? The Legendary Ghost Coder of the Nineties? Sir Robert Ting?”

Everyone was shocked. Robert Ting? The mythical hacker who helped the government bring down the biggest banking fraud in 1999 and suddenly disappeared like a bubble?

The old man sighed. He took off his glasses and wiped them.

“It’s been a long time. Robert Ting is dead. Only Berting is here. I just want a quiet life. It’s easier to fix equipment than to clean up the filth of criminals on the internet.”

Kevin fell to his knees in shame. The person he insulted and called ignorant was actually the architect of the security protocols they were studying in the book. The “Ting Protocol” used by the bank was named after this inventory staff.

“Sir… sorry,” Kevin said tearfully. “My arrogance. I don’t know.”

Mang Berting patted Kevin on the head.

“Son, in the world of tech, everything changes quickly. What’s good today is outdated tomorrow. But attitude is the permanent source code of your personality. If your attitude is corrupt, no matter how good you are at coding, you’re still a system failure in the eyes of people.”

Mang Berting left the office in silence. The next day, Mr. Tan offered him the position of Chief Security Officer with a million-dollar salary. But Mang Berting turned it down. His only request? A new inventory trolley that was in good shape, and respect from all employees—not because he was a legend, but because he was a man who worked honorably.

From then on, whenever Mang Berting entered the server room, all the programmers would stand up and greet him. They learned that true genius doesn’t make noise, and the strongest firewall is humility.