The first story is another one from Xiaoyu. Once again, it involves a customer. Once again, the spec sheet was the problem.
Xiaoyu asked, roughly, “How do you understand quezhi here? Is it a fixed value or a range?”
I said, “A definite value? I’ve only heard that term used as a fixed value. So obviously it’s fixed.”
Xiaoyu told me to look at the document.
Turns out it wasn’t 确值 at all. It was 阈值 — “threshold.” I told him he was illiterate. If he’d said something that sounded like “valve value,” I might at least have guessed what he meant. But how do you look at 阈 and read it as 阙?
What’s funny is that the Japanese side was using the term directly. It makes you wonder whether this is one of those words that took a detour through Japanese and then slipped back into Chinese usage without anyone noticing.
Our company is only a peripheral asset attached to a state-owned enterprise, but the SOE atmosphere has been getting thicker and thicker.
Back in June, during the Dragon Boat Festival, the holiday gift pack included two decks of "Guandan" playing cards. In a place where the tradition is basically three full decks, handing out only two is already baffling enough. On top of that, these cards were bigger than normal ones. So even if you somehow found a third deck and tried to make it work, they still wouldn’t feel right in your hands.
By August, after seeing some related news coverage, it suddenly made more sense. That’s why group leadership is group leadership: vice-ministerial rank, broad vision, the whole big-picture mindset.
Starting in mid-August, the company began enforcing a daily “Earth Hour” — meaning lights out.
The moment the lights went off, people in the office started feeling sleepy.
That made me, the person who spends lunch break casually surfing online, look especially out of place. It didn’t help that I was using a mechanical keyboard with illuminated tea switches.
I had to switch to reading novels instead.
Not a major disaster, just annoying.
Then from September 1, for three straight days, department management sent out urgent notice after urgent notice: every evening before leaving, all computers had to be shut down, servers included, and project managers were responsible for checking.
The internal email was perfectly clear. Headquarters had hired an outside evaluation company, and every night at 8 p.m. they would conduct simulated attack-and-defense drills. This was described as a “political task.”
So in order to avoid getting caught with your guard down, the chosen strategy was to cut your own hands off first.
After the school term started, my kid got a new homeroom teacher.
She’s probably a post-1970s teacher nearing retirement age. But her style feels less like someone from her own generation and more like the kind of teacher I dealt with thirty years ago.
On the second day of school, she managed to offend the entire class’s parents. Including the ones who had been eagerly orbiting around her.
It started with the annual school insurance purchase, same as every other year. At dismissal, she kept the students in class for an extra 25 minutes to lecture them on “the necessity of buying insurance.”
It was a very practical sort of opening show of force. And yes, every parent ended up buying it. That part, on its own, wasn’t really the issue.
After signing the school paperwork, parents still had to complete payment by bank transfer or through Alipay for the policy to take effect. The teacher then used a collaborative document the next day to collect screenshots of everyone’s policy.
She emphasized in the group chat that the screenshots had to show a signature and a date. Of course, the layout differs a bit depending on whether you pay through a bank or directly through Alipay.
After a few parents uploaded their screenshots, she exploded in the chat: “My instructions were perfectly clear! Why can’t you people do it right?”
Then she posted an example screenshot — but only for one of the payment methods.
As more parents submitted theirs, she deleted them one by one. What she actually wanted was the page showing the policy effective date, not the page showing the contract signing date. The problem was that she had never explained that clearly. Worse, even the example she posted herself showed the contract signing date page.
In the end, one parent who actually works in insurance had to privately message other parents one by one to explain what the teacher really wanted. One father, in particular, got rejected six times because his submission still didn’t match her unstated requirement.
Even after the materials were finally uploaded to the education bureau, the teacher’s wrong example screenshot was still sitting there in the document.
So naturally she didn’t think she had made any mistake at all. Instead, at dismissal she kept the students another 25 minutes and loudly scolded the parents: they were “uncultured,” “low quality,” and unable to understand such a simple request.
She also brought back a full set of disciplinary tricks straight out of my own primary school days, assigning conduct points to every student. The usual items — chatting, fooling around, not paying attention in class — were there, of course. But she also deducted points for things like writing your name crookedly on an exam paper, wearing a black mask, not greeting a teacher loudly enough, or even making noises while eating.
Being strict about discipline is one thing. The real problem is that she has no respect for people. Every little issue gets turned into a public mockery session in the group chat. Either she has no idea how strong children’s self-respect is now, or she has forgotten that one of her colleagues was poisoned by a student from the neighboring class just before summer break.
On September 10, these supposedly low-quality parents did not send the teacher so much as half a line of holiday greetings.
Without any coordination at all, they somehow all arrived at the same decision.
Note: “fu” refers to menstruation.
