We have a new kid at work: a fresh graduate born in 2001. He’s my first colleague from the post-2000 generation.
I knew kids these days aren’t great with keyboards, but I didn’t expect this. His first step was to log in to the intranet, activate his account, and change his password. The initial password was twelve characters, mixed upper- and lowercase letters, digits, and special characters, handwritten on a slip. One handwritten k and R were hard to tell apart, and one capital C was a little uncertain; everything else was perfectly clear. Brute force would have taken four tries at most. He sat there pecking at the page for forty-five minutes.
One look over his shoulder explained it: he was treating Caps Lock like the one-shot Shift key on a phone’s on-screen keyboard. He’d press it, type a capital letter, and never press it again.
Not that it mattered much—it wasn’t my time being wasted.
I’m his mentor, not his babysitter. Unzipping files, creating shortcuts, opening Calculator and Notepad, running something as administrator, accessing network folders—I’m not teaching that.
Before making a training plan I asked, ‘Do you know C?’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘We had a course. I got over 80.’
Great, I thought, no need to start from the basics. I installed Visual Studio and told him to get familiar with it. I walked him through creating an empty project: ‘Type hello world and let’s see.’
Ten minutes of huffing and puffing later, he gave me:
printf <"hello world"> ;
Angle brackets! The kid used angle brackets! If he had ever typed a single line and compiled it, he couldn’t have made that mistake. If Tan Haoqiang had seen it, he’d have pulled out a forty-meter sword and cut him down.
On Friday my wife found a dying cicada on her way home from work and brought it back for the kitten, Jiaozi. It didn’t take long for the cat to play it to death. Jiaozi looked mopey and wronged.
During the evening walk I caught a fresh one from a tree, cut half its wings off, and tossed it to Jiaozi. The little thing was thrilled and wouldn’t let it go.
After ten, before bed, my wife said, ‘Throw the cicada out, or it’ll die in some corner and we won’t find it and it’ll be gross.’ Jiaozi was still having a great time, so I said, ‘Let it play a little longer. I’ll throw it out before I go to bed.’
Near midnight, when I was ready to sleep, I remembered the bug. I walked around the floor and didn’t see it. Jiaozi was already lying down, so no useful clues there. I was too tired. I went to sleep.
Saturday morning, first thing, my wife asked, ‘Did you throw out the cicada?’
I said, ‘I couldn’t find it.’
She exploded: ‘You’d better find it today after work and show me, or you’re not sleeping tonight!’
Only an idiot would go looking. If I couldn’t find it at night, would daytime help? I went out and caught another one. Brought it home, cut its wings, sprayed it dead with insecticide, and handed in the assignment when she got home.
Monday at work, I put my foot into my work shoe: fuck. It was in there.
After Choubao graduated, more than half the class arranged a graduation photo shoot. Besides the individual prints, there were lots of group shots. Since they were a big customer, the photographer generously gave them all the original group photos for free.
He sent a link to a Baidu netdisk folder; the photos came to 1.8G.
Downloading it was a project. Every day after work I turned on the computer, or on weekends I’d start at seven in the morning and leave it running until after eleven at night, when I went to sleep. It took two whole weeks. My wife asked about the progress almost every day. Eventually she couldn’t stand it, came over to inspect, and complained: ‘Isn’t there a 4.5-yuan option that takes a few hours? Your electricity bill for all these days is more than 4.5.’
I said, ‘I have to have the computer on anyway. I can’t save that electricity.’
That was an excuse. The truth is, the internet company I hate most in this life is Baidu. I’d rather spend extra than give it money.
Last week Choubao’s after-school care had only one day of class.
Monday night the principal sent an urgent notice: the education bureau was making a surprise inspection, and kids shouldn’t bring textbooks. On Tuesday the children played games for half the day and watched videos for half the day. Wednesday there was another inspection, and the principal suddenly arranged for everyone to go to an amusement park. That afternoon an announcement came out: Tuesday’s inspection found three off-campus care providers illegally teaching academic classes, and they were ordered to suspend operations. They were all in our district; two were less than two kilometers away as the crow flies.
Thursday and Friday we were simply told not to come. The district inspection was over, apparently, but the national inspection team had been sent down.
We have an elderly family member to watch the kid, so these surprise inspections don’t bother us much. I just wish they’d spread the rain around a little. Don’t keep staring at our area—show some concern for the physical and mental health of the kids in the other three districts.
Some bloggers have added IP location display. I hate it. Sure, I could just not leave comments, but I can’t remember who has the feature. So every time I discover one, I unsubscribe.