Site Story: A Tongue Twister

This happened a long time ago, when I was still working in the Philippines. My boss then was one of the more famous Filipino-Chinese architects in the country. Naturally, as the flow of Philippine economics goes, he had a broad base of Filipino-Chinese clients.

We designed a house for one such client, and we were retained by him to supervise the construction when the designs were done. As soon as construction began, the client was like a permanent fixture at the site as he made it a point to be there everyday and see what was going on. His daily visits made the assigned site superintendent seem superfluous, and as most of us with site experience will attest, that is not the best situation for a site superintendent to be in. Sooner or later something has to give, and soon enough, something did give.

The construction was about 2/3rds done when the client had this big confrontation with the site superintendent. It was the day that the door jambs were being installed. The client, with his heavy Chinese accent, had been pointing to one particular door jamb that was installed and shouting: "tangilid! tangilid!".

Hoping to remedy the situation, the site superintendent immediately inspected the door jamb to see if it was indeed "tagilid" (the Filipino term for "askew"), as he understood the client to have said. Going over the door more than once, he found the door to be adequately squared. He then proceeded to tell the client that everything was fine. The client, however, was still very much livid and was still shouting: "tangilid! tangilid!", until he was red in the face.

Unfortunately, the superintendent did not know how to speak Chinese, which really shouldn't be a problem in the Philippines, however, the client couldn't speak much Filipino either, and when he did try to speak Filipino, it still sounded like Chinese.

When I first heard about the ruckus, I really wanted to help, but unfortunately, even if I was a Filipino-Chinese myself, my Chinese sounded like Filipino.

I know it's messed up, but let us just move along shall we?

The shouting by the client continued: "tangilid! tangilid!".

This time though, the frustrated superintendent had a shout of his own: "hinde! hinde!".

It was a good thing that my boss had come to the site before things had gotten worse. And better still, my boss was a Filipino-Chinese who can make Filipino and Chinese sound just about right at the level of human comprehension. He spoke to the client immediately to get to the bottom of things.

As it turns out, what the client was in fact trying to say was that he thinks the jamb is not made of Narra, his preferred kind of wood, but was instead made from Tanguile, a lower class of wood. He felt that the contractor was ripping him off. So it wasn't the door being "tagilid" but being made of "tanguile" that the client was so hopped up about.

My boss, inspecting the jamb soon came to his own conclusion and said, "Tangilid nga!".

Of course, the "tangilid" - I mean Tanguile - was soon replaced with narra and the world was right once more.