Li Yu took a leave of absence to participate in the offline written examination of the Third Age. After answering the questions, he took the subway back to the company and continued to write plans.
I was busy until eight o'clock in the evening, sending the completed third version of the plan to my immediate superior via the group email, and also copied it to the department leader as required.
Five minutes later, I received a reply from my boss, asking him if he could rush out two more editions and hand them in before noon tomorrow to give customers more choices.
Li Yu checked his schedule and found that he would have a regular department meeting tomorrow morning. The regular meeting would take at least one and a half hours, which meant that he would only have two hours at most to continue working on the plan, and his work summary and next steps
The work plan for a cycle has not been written yet.
So he took twenty minutes to complete this part of the work, then got up, moved his body a little, went to the tea room to make a cup of coffee, rubbed his sore wrist, sat down, and began to continue writing a new plan.
When he finished another version of the plan, the time on the lower right side of the computer screen showed that it was now 22:59.
About half an hour ago, Li Yu's immediate supervisor just left the office, took the elevator to the underground parking lot, and drove home.
So Li Yu also closed the computer, picked up his backpack, and prepared to get off work.
When he clocked in at the attendance machine, half of the people in the department were still there, and the blue light emitted by the IPS screen reflected on their faces, making their expressions look a little dull.
At the same time, lights were still on on most floors in another office building across the street.
Li Yu's company was on the sixth and seventh floors of Building A. Li Yu glanced at the elevators. Three of the four elevators had stopped, and there was one on the twenty-sixth floor. He didn't want to wait any longer, so he went straight
Go downstairs through the emergency passage on the side.
As a result, when I went down to the fourth floor, I heard a faint sound of sobbing.
Li Yu did not see the owner of the voice, and could only roughly judge that the voice came from the platforms on the first and second floors.
The voice sounded like that of a girl. She was on the phone with her family, crying at the same time.
"I can't hold on any longer...I've been here for three months after graduation, and I've only worked seven days without overtime...I work at least twelve hours a day, and I'm given all the work. The leader still gives me a group rating."
The lowest level, training me in front of everyone is like training a dog. Mom, I am really tired..."
Li Yu didn't want to embarrass the other party, so he quietly exited the corridor and found another safe passage.
I didn't meet anyone else this time.
Li Yu went downstairs smoothly, walked out of the door, crossed diagonally across the small square in front of the office building, turned right onto the crosswalk, and smelled a scent after walking a few steps.
The area around here is basically filled with office buildings, and the most indispensable thing is people working the night shift.
So the mobile vendors who sensed the business opportunities came in a swarm on tricycles and pulled gas tanks. After nine o'clock in the evening, the roadside was full of various food stalls, rice noodles, burritos, fried rice noodles, etc.
Chicken steak... everything.
Nowadays, most of the urban management officials have taken a break, and they no longer have to hide around. It’s a good time to do business.
At five o'clock in the afternoon, Li Yu ate the half bag of bread left in the morning for dinner. At this moment, he felt a little hungry again, so he spent eight yuan to buy a box of vegetarian fried noodles.
After scanning the QR code to pay, he carried the hot fried noodles and continued walking forward.
Li Yu's place of work is on the edge of the North Fourth Ring Road, but the house he rents is outside the East Fifth Ring Road.
There is still quite a distance. The commute time by subway is one hour and twenty minutes on weekdays. Especially during the morning rush hour, you have to leave ten minutes earlier to avoid being late.
The reason why he lived so far away was, firstly, because the rent in the east was cheaper, and secondly, because the rent was cheaper, Li Yu signed a two-year contract at the time.
It used to be a 30-minute ride to where he worked before, but he switched jobs to his current company a year ago, and the time spent on the road was even longer.
Fortunately, it's not too long to accept.
After working for a long time after graduation, Li Yu found that there were fewer and fewer things that he could not accept.
When I walked to the bus stop, there were already six or seven figures standing there. Like Li Yu, they were all people working in nearby office buildings. There were men and women.
To be honest, the white-collar workers working in this CBD are generally quite good-looking.
Especially women, many of them keep fit and keep their bodies in good shape. Each one is better at makeup than the other. Even on a crowded subway, she can still draw her eyebrows steadily. She can easily dress in Japanese, Japanese or Korean styles.
Driving, walking on the street on weekdays, always attracts a lot of attention.
However, none of the four men on the platform looked around. They just lowered their heads and played with their mobile phones.
Some people are sending messages to their girlfriends, some are reading novels and browsing forums, and some are watching vtuber live broadcasts. Advertisements for real estate and plastic surgery hospitals are scrolling alternately on the rectangular light box behind them.
Ten minutes later, bus No. 6 arrived at the station.
Li Yu and several others swiped their cards one by one to get on the bus, found an empty seat and sat down.
Many people may take it for granted that buses traveling through the city late at night will be empty, but this is not the case.
The passengers on the night shift bus are very complicated. In addition to migrant workers like Li Yu and others who work late, there are also drivers with small cars and scalpers who carry sleeping bags and are ready to grab shoes, bags and houses. Wear cool clothes to go.
Young people dancing and drinking in nightclubs, or foreigners with sad faces who bring their children to big cities for medical treatment...
In winter, homeless people scavenging occasionally get on the bus to keep warm. Most of them squeeze into the last row and get on the bus from the starting station without saying a word. They sit until the end station before getting off the bus. They sit for a whole day.
The circle takes about two hours.
It's also the cheapest way to stay warm they can find in the city.
Li Yu set the alarm, put on his headphones, put his backpack in his arms, and then leaned his head against the car window nearby. After a while, he closed his eyes amid the bumps and fell into a light sleep.
Night 6 Road was driving leisurely in the forest of steel and concrete.
The same trajectory is repeated day after day, just like Li Yu and most people living in this city.
Li Yu didn't know when he started, but he always felt trapped by something.
At first, he thought it was because his last job was too boring. However, when he moved to his current company, the feeling of being trapped did not disappear. Instead, it became stronger and stronger.
The most obvious manifestation is the fading desire for communication and curiosity.
Li Yu is not a particularly talkative person, but he was definitely not as taciturn as he is now when he was in school. He even joined the debate club in college and won several competitions.
However, after entering the workplace, Li Yu became less and less talkative day by day.
Because you don’t know what words you have said in WeChat groups or private places will be used by people with ulterior motives and turned into hidden arrows aimed at you.
I don’t know if those colleagues who appear to be righteous and join everyone in accusing the company of unreasonable systems are secretly the informants of a certain leader.
Be cautious in what you say and do, read more and speak less. This is the first rule of survival in the workplace that Li Yu learned.
As for curiosity, Li Yu also took part in the weird written test of the Third Age in the afternoon and suddenly realized that he had not read a book properly for a long time.
He used to be very interested in things like history, geography, philosophy and natural science. He also searched for many books and documentaries in private and watched them late into the night with great interest. However, after working, he found that this messy knowledge could bring him great benefits in the workplace.
Help is limited.
In this city, everyone is always concerned about KPIs, those tables and figures on the screen, how to let the boss see the results of their work, how to get promoted and get a salary increase. Fewer and fewer people will care about those things that cannot bring results.
something profitable.
But you can't blame modern people for being too ignorant and boring, because most people are already very strenuous just to live.
Those experts and scholars are always shouting on the Internet all day long, saying that short videos, fast food literature and junk mobile games are destroying a generation.
However, they intentionally or unintentionally ignored why all this happened.
When you work overtime for several weeks in a row and come home exhausted and dizzy, does your already overwhelmed brain want to be baptized by poetry and art masterpieces, or would you rather just find some black stockings and have a great time?
Go up?
In fact, Li Yu has not touched even stand-alone games for a long time. Although it is a discount season, he will still subconsciously focus on this year's masterpieces.
But after the download and installation are completed, those games lie on the hard drive and quietly gather dust.
Even when watching a movie, Li Yu started to fast forward at double speed.
Of course he also wanted to escape from this life, but he didn't know where to escape.
If you want to settle in this city, you have to buy a house, and if you want to buy a house, you have to work hard. No matter which company you switch to, working overtime is almost inevitable.
And when you work overtime to the point where you suffer from occupational diseases, you will look back and find that the little money you earn is just a drop in the bucket compared to the high housing prices.
Li Yu also thought about returning to his hometown, but he could hardly find a professional job in a third-tier town. The wages there were lower and the bosses of private companies were even less humane. The only reliable option was to take the civil service examination.
Unfortunately, other people think the same way, so it becomes more difficult to pass the public examination every year.
In some cities, street offices and police assistants all started as graduate students.
Moreover, regardless of the difficulty, small places place more emphasis on human relationships than rules. After entering the public service system, you have to face overwhelming official documents and endless ideological construction...
Of course, even so, taking the public examination is still a very good way out for most young people who are drifting on the front line, including Li Yu.
But Li Yu had to face another problem - if the feeling of being trapped does not disappear after returning to his hometown, where can he retreat to?
The longer Li Yu works, the more deeply he feels that society is like some kind of huge and complex machine, and individuals are like the screws and parts of the machine.
No one cares about what a screw was originally intended to be. Most people are just roughly stuffed into a screw mouth that is not suitable for them, and then, with a huge roar, they are thrown into the endless cycle of production and reproduction.
Until the polished flesh and blood were completely embedded in the gap, and he could no longer move.
This chapter has been completed!