It was noon at the 40-storey building under construction in the middle of Ortigas. The heat was seeping through the helmets, and the cement dust was clinging to the sweat of each worker. Amid the noise of the drill and the shouting, a man was quietly lifting hollow blocks from the corner.

He was Mang Karding.

Mang Karding looked frightening. He had a long scar from his eyebrows to his jaw. He always wore a black hoodie jacket even when the sun was blazing, and his eyes seemed to always be angry. No one spoke to him. His fellow peons suspected that he was an ex-convict hiding from the law, or perhaps a member of a syndicate “cooling off.”

“Don’t go near Karding,” the foreman whispered to the newbies. “He might stab you when he gets angry. See that black bag he always carries? Maybe it’s a gun.”

On the other hand, there was Engr. Enrico, the new and arrogant Site Engineer. Rich kid, from a top university, and always yelled at the workers when his white shoes got dirty.

“What’s that! Why are you so slow?!” Enrico shouted while pointing at the formworks of the main beam on the 15th floor. “Pour the cement! We need to finish by 2 PM!”

The old foreman hesitated. “Sir Enrico, it seems like the steel can’t handle the weight. The span is too big. The scaffolding might give way.”

“Are you questioning me?” Enrico asked, holding his plan. “I’m the Engineer here. I calculated the load. Pour it!”

The workers did nothing. The cement began to pour. Mang Karding was there on the side, leaning against the wall, watching what was happening while chewing on a stick-o. He shook his head slowly.

Suddenly, they heard a sound. CREAAAK…

The steel supporting the beam began to buckle. The scaffolding rumbled.

“Sir! It’s going to collapse!” the foreman shouted.

Enrico panicked. He turned pale. He saw his mistake—he had forgotten to factor in the “live load” of the wet concrete in his calculations earlier. It was too late. If it collapsed, the people below would be trapped and the entire section of the floor would collapse. He couldn’t think of a solution. He was mentally blocked with fear.

The workers ran away.

But Mang Karding, instead of running, calmly walked into the middle of the chaos.

He picked up a piece of charcoal from the floor. He grabbed an empty sack of cement.

Within ten seconds, Karding wrote on the sack.

Not drawings of a rascal, but numbers. Integral calculus. Stress analysis. Load distribution formula.

“You!” Karding shouted at the foreman. His voice was not the raspy voice of a criminal, but the voice of a commander. “Get three hydraulic jacks from the warehouse! Now!”

The foreman was surprised but immediately complied out of fear.

“You guys!” Karding pointed at the three peons. “Weld a cross-brace on Column A and B. Use 16mm steel. 45 degrees angle! Quick!”

Karding turned to Enrico who was still dumbfounded. “Boy! Don’t stare at that! Hold this sack and read the coordinates where to place the jack!”

Driven by adrenaline, Enrico complied. He read the writing on the sack. His eyes widened. The computation… was so clean. So fast. Better than a computer. Better than Euler-Bernoulli beam theory applied to a real-time crisis!

Within fifteen minutes, everyone moved at Mang Karding’s behest. The braces were in place. The jacks were set up.

The sound of steel stopped. The falling cement stopped.

The 15th floor was saved.

When the dust settled, everyone fell silent. Everyone looked at Mang Karding who was now wiping his hands on his dirty pants again.

Enrico approached, his knees still shaking. “Who are you, Manong? How did you know about… how did you solve that?”

Page: SAY – Story Around You | Original story.

Karding didn’t answer. He took out his black bag that everyone was afraid of.

“Maybe he’s going to pull out a gun!” whispered a worker.

Karding opened the bag. It wasn’t a gun.

The contents were an old hard hat with a gold plating on the name, and a cup with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) logo.

That’s when Enrico noticed the ID that had fallen out of the bag.

DR. RICARDO “KARDING” SALAZAR, PhD in Structural Engineering. Former Dean, College of Engineering. “The Legend of Asian Infrastructure.”

Enrico gasped. “Dr. Salazar? Are you the one who wrote our college book? The one that disappeared five years ago?”

Karding nodded as he put on his hoodie. “The office is boring, son. All politics, all thrift, all theft. I like it better here. It smells like cement. Real work. No plastic.”

“But… why are you pretending to be a porter?” Enrico asked.

Karding pointed to the scar on his face. “I got this when a bridge that my former boss, the contractor, built collapsed. From then on, I promised myself that I would watch every building from below, not from above. I see the faults better when I am the one lifting it.”

Karding patted the arrogant engineer on the shoulder. “Enrico, you are smart. But next time, don’t rely on a book to predict a person’s life. And don’t underestimate the person holding a sack, because the solution to your problem might be written in that sack.”

Mang Karding walked away, carrying his bag.

The next day, Mang Karding was no longer at the site. He said he had resigned. But he left the sack of cement with the computation on Enrico’s desk.

Enrico had it reframed and hung it in his office. Underneath it, a motto was written:

“RESPECT EVERYONE. EVEN THE ONE CARRYING THE HOLLOW BLOCKS KNOWS MORE PHYSICS THAN YOU.”

And the legend of Mang Karding? It’s spread all over Manila. Whenever a building nearly collapsed but was suddenly repaired, the workers knew—Dr. Karding was there, quietly watching, ready to help with charcoal and sacks.