Don Orlando impacted me more than I realized at the time.
I started working with him as a delivery driver when I was 27. I hadn’t had a job in about a year, and he gave me a chance. He made his own chorizo — his own recipe, his own brand. He was a Salvadorian man in his mid-to-late 50s. Good dude. Always wore a cap. Curly gray hair. A deep, radio-type voice. The kind of intellectual man you’d never expect to find in the hood.
He loved his black coffee — no sugar, no milk.
He was obsessed with detail.
He loved conspiracy theories.
And for a man his age, he shocked me — he built his own computer, made his own cheese, imported a germ from Asia to create that cheese. Before that, he ran a catering business. He bought a lunch truck in the late ’70s, and he and his wife ran it themselves.
One day, he told me he had fixed something around his house. His neighbor saw it and asked if he could do the same work for him. Orlando said yes even though he didn’t know what he was doing yet — and from there, he built a construction business.
Later, after buying some chorizo from a local market and hating the taste, he said, “I can do better.”
So he invented his own chorizo brand.
By the time I started working with him, he had already been doing this for ten years — seven days a week, no days off.
He trusted me quickly. Eventually, he let me run his whole delivery route while he stayed home to rest a little. And every day, when I finished delivering and returned the extra chorizo and his laptop, he would call out:
“Roberto!
Vení pa’ acá — come here.”
I’d walk over, and he’d show me whatever new thing he was building.
At that time, he was building his own 3D-printing machine from scratch — parts from Home Depot, an old monitor, random pieces he found. He downloaded software, taught himself how to use it, and because he was great at math, he figured out how to 3D-print his grandson’s face onto a piece of wood. Every day he improved something on that machine, and he always showed me the update.
He’d talk tech with me.
Talk business.
Talk photography — he had learned photography on his own when he was young, developing film in his bathroom for weeks until he got it right.
One day he asked me, “Do you like your car?”
(Talking about my beat-up 2000 white Nissan Altima.)
I said, “What’s wrong with my car?”
He laughed — a deep, radio laugh — and said, “Nothing’s wrong. I’m asking if you want something better for yourself.”
He’d tell me things like:
“You have a brain.
You have hands.
You have feet.
That’s all you need.
You can learn anything.”
He planted ideas in me I never even considered.
He made me believe that a regular guy — a guy like me — could learn, could build, could create, could become something.
He was the first man who ever spoke to me as if I had potential.
Not as a worker.
Not as someone beneath him.
But as someone who could rise.
He didn’t just give me a job.
He gave me a blueprint for being a man who learns everything and fears nothing.
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