This article was published in the April 2022 issue of ELLEMEN, Vol. 1
Original title "Workplace"
When the entrance to the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore is crowded with tourists; international students take the London to Oxford train to sweep the goods; the Pink House in Los Angeles reappears on the photo wall of social networks. My colleagues and I outside of Shanghai tried to work hard —not to love jobs, to love the company, to suffer hardships. On the one hand, I am tired of the status quo, tired, rolling my eyes and smiling; more is afraid, afraid of not having food to eat.
There is a Persian metaphor that says the moon is a mirror of time. Knowing these words, I began to hate the moon, and seeing it was like seeing time turn into a mudslide, swooping down on my heels.
And the Little Red Book replaced Tiger Flutter as my biggest source of information. Three months later, the book that I had been recommending to people everywhere just halfway through reading it was called "The Feeling of The End", and I haven't finished it yet. This author speaks like an acrobatic, and when he speaks, his tongue is like the fingers of a blind master, aiming at your brain nerves up and down his hands. You shout and hi. But he always jumps the scene, and is saying playful things a second ago, and the heroine and the reader feel that he is too clever and charming. The next second he will talk directly to the reader across the screen. This pose is like the actor in the variety show who single-handedly winked at you.
It is better to read the Little Red Book, all of which are books. I read the Little Red Book a lot, and the page is becoming more and more like Tiger Flutter Walking Street. The content changed from the basic model to Mbappe, Garnett, Daigou, used cars, hot girls, muscle men plus Yu Hua and Chen Danqing. There is also unreasonableness, how to push me so much "workplace" content, and two or three I know, not the kind of understanding that I know James, and the kind of recognition that I greet when I meet on the street.
Surprisingly, "workplace" is a very strange word for me. The company pays for your time, and you give the company a problem. Singing is the technology, playing football is the technology, writing is the technology, sweeping the floor, cooking and cutting hair are all technology, going to work is the technology? Give advice to the Xiaohongshu business department, workplace content you collect an album, print it into a VCD, and go to the airport to open a counter.
It's hot, and when riding a bike, the wind is zebra-shaped. Warm winds hit the forehead, cold winds on the chin, and the wind in the nostrils mixed with the smell of sewers and grass.
Before this round of closure, sales colleagues gathered for dinner, and I went to beat chicken blood for everyone. Shanghai after work hours, many people walk on the street, they need to walk a stop, 800 meters, to see the exquisite people's homes, let people look at the fashionable themselves. Good looking, one more look, one more look back, never see again.
I told my colleagues that after four years, you are not familiar with me, why? Because in my eyes you are hamsters running in circles, and the more laps you win. I'm a hamster, and so is my boss. It's fair and you won't get preferential treatment because you're funny or good-looking. I am a pedometer, a tape measure, I don't exist. If the leader asks at work what your ideal is, you should pay attention to it, he is going to take advantage of you. If someone says at work, to be honest, you have to pay attention to the fact that he is going to say an important lie.
Only you outperform others, you get the money, you are the winner. Money and stories, shared with your family, your life has meaning. When I finished, I waited for the applause—the silence lasted three seconds—and everyone didn't understand it, or two words were spoken in their hearts.
I actually tell some office stories, such as the story I told the most a few years ago about a fight I had with a colleague.
In 2012, I was still doing journalism, following my teachers out of the portal to make a famous financial magazine. My role still fits my expectations, I am different, young, withdrawn, writing better than everyone else, and I was treated favorably by publishers since childhood. I'm 25 years old, and they put me in charge of the new app's homepage content and served as the leader of three editors. In addition, for example, such as the Fangshan disaster or the Ya'an earthquake, the publisher will designate me to write it.
I probably started to spend high at that time, when my after-tax income was only 10,000 yuan, and the first month I got a salary, I went to the Mercedes-Benz store to sell my Skoda and replaced it with Mercedes-Benz's first c200 with a turbocharged engine. I bought Armani's suit and worked out with Zhang Fengyi at the Zhaolong Hotel. Above, it's not a story of a credit card serial bankruptcy, I don't use a credit card, it's just that I eat poorly, but no one knows.
Until the newsroom came a Chengdu native. The publisher asked me to follow him in the magazine section. He understood that he was my leader; I understood it as, politeness.
The man looks 35 or 6 years old, and if he's not bald, he might look only 30. He always wore a white T-shirt underneath a blue shirt. Every day when I rode a bicycle, big wheels, black bearings, two handlebars bent into the shape of wings, and a plastic bell wrapped around the right handlebar—a bell that looked more advanced but didn't sound very well—he was like this bell in my mind. He would quietly tell a colleague that he had grown up in Hong Kong and then went to England as a teenager, possibly a British national, and most recently a Hong Kong national. Served the BBC as well as Disney while in the UK.
In short, the domestic media is unprofessional in his view, the selection of topics, recording, writing, material crossover, the process of publishing, all this is like a broken house in the village in the city, he returned, he wants to draw a circle on the wall with red paint, write and demolish. This colleague became his fan, and he became a tape recorder in a broken house, helping him broadcast preaching.
He also likes to stop talking. For example, when people eat on the balcony at noon to discuss Beijing house prices, he will say Oh, my mother bought a house in London that is a little more expensive than this, but the good guys are freehold. After saying that, he looked bad and broken, and punched himself in the mouth, but did not hit. For example, at the appraisal meeting, the publisher said that a certain watch was advertised again, and everyone's work was fruitful. He would hold the advertisement and say that this watch is good, and my grandfather's piece can still be accurately walked. Finish speaking, again, posture to cover your mouth.
It is also said that the publisher paid him only a dollar lower than the editor-in-chief. Legend, gave him the treatment of a legend. Hurting my self-esteem, I was no longer the special one. Now think about it, what about the editor-in-chief's self-esteem?
After removing all the shortcomings of this Chengdu person, he also has several advantages. For example, the brain is fast, we see three views in a question brain, he can always find the other three; he is good at English, foreign information becomes part of his brain, for example, he should be the first person in China to discuss buzzfeed; he reads foreign literature a lot, and when he does not show off Shakespeare's famous words, his narrative style, vocabulary, and sentence-making logic are richer.
So what? When people regard another person as an enemy, every word they say is provocative, they are expressing their grievances.
I do the magazine content at my own pace and hand it over to the process editors. He took the manuscript back and talked for about fifteen minutes, summing it up in three words, unprofessional. All I wanted to do was pick up every print at my fingertips and smash them at him, one by one. But I instigated it, and changed it according to his opinion, and changed it to 2 o'clock in the night. Because I thought I still had a car loan to pay back. From then on to this day, the word professional has never appeared in my mouth again.
More than a year later, I still picked up the prints in my hand and smashed them at him one by one. The editor-in-chief eventually found that we couldn't stop and told me that I didn't have to work with him anymore. But he wasn't told. He still tried to lead me, and I had to hit him during work hours.
Whenever I talk to people about this, I essentially want to show my bravery. But in fact, this is the same as the plot of picking up a wine glass and throwing people in the face in the workplace drama, which is childish and embarrassing. Besides, the book didn't hit him at all. I threw it crooked, threw a dozen copies and just threw it crooked.
Last week, at dinner with friends, people asked, saying that if one day, I have the opportunity to go back to my former work unit and kill my former opponents. What do I have to do so that others don't say I'm taking revenge?
I said, how old are you? And live to show others. In addition to earning a salary and solving problems, my biggest goal is revenge. You see I have about three enemies and two. In an honest manner. One of them, who once asked me for tea, told me if he could let him go over, I didn't answer the phone, and half a year later I had it on my hands. You tell your son the story of happiness and revenge, which has aesthetic significance; you tell him that Lao Tzu has black hands, hides needles in the cotton, stabs a knife in the back and pretends to be a good person, this story you can't say.
He said, OK, then the others ask me, and I will say revenge.
The values that influence others are always uplifting. I went on to say that hypocrisy is the hardest thing in the world, and it requires full concentration and vigilance when dreaming. So every hypocritical person will be recognized, sooner or later. So I choose honesty, honesty with pain, and hypocrisy with pain.
He interrupted me, half-rolled his eyes and said, I'll give you another beautiful girl to listen.
Editorial Director Zhou Jingwei