In the summer of 2ooo, I went to work as an accountant in charge of a factory in the northern suburbs of the city, which was far away, at the foot of the hill and beside the canal, but there was no aura of beautiful mountains and rivers, only that the place was just dirty, the trees on the hill and the roadside were covered with a layer of dust, and in the dark green water of the canal slowly drove a dilapidated cement boat full of yellow sand.

The factory is a gas plant that produces oxygen, nitrogen, and acetylene, and it has long been poorly managed and frequently bankrupt, but the tree has not been dispersed, and some aspiring young people in the factory have colluded with the wealthy masters outside to contract the factory, but the original factory department has not been disbanded, and all important functional departments are readily available, such as the factory office, the party branch, the trade union, the women's federation, the family planning commission, the youth league committee, the security department, the financial department, and so on. Entrenched in the latest building in the factory, it looks like the Forbidden City of Emperor Puyi.

I was hired by a contractor to work in a small, dilapidated building opposite the old factory headquarters, and I spent my days facing a lot of bad debts, doing nothing, and wandering around the factory when I had nothing to do.

The factory is overgrown with grass, most of the workshops and warehouses are hung with rusty locks or wires, and the glass on the doors and windows is incomplete and black inside. Several bungalows with blue bricks and gray tiles are about to collapse, and there are still plaster-written safety production slogans on the crooked walls. Several other workshops are still in production, the tall workshops are also dilapidated, the machines are running fast, the sound is loud, but the workers are not visible.

In the new company set up by the contractor, except for me and the chairman, the rest are all the original team members of the factory, and my immediate boss, the financial manager, is the female cadre who was engaged in family planning in the factory, and her husband is the current general manager of the company, and the youngest and most promising deputy section chief in the factory. There is also a management minister, who is also a highly respected engineer in the original factory. Everyone looked full of ambition all day long, and held meetings at every turn, and pulled up the salesmen of the supply and marketing department and several workshop directors to discuss the world's major events.

My daily life is the same, get up at seven o'clock in the morning, strive to rush to the factory before half past eight, get off the car at the factory gate, show respect for a few shirtless men in the guard room, and then park the car in a small yard, scan the manager's Honda 125 road racer and the financial manager's Golden Bird 5o moped are not there, if I am there, it proves that I am late, fly upstairs, enter the office, turn on the ceiling fan with only one degree, sweep the floor indiscriminately, sprinkle some water, after cleaning, You can sit in my seat and wait for everyone's 6 to come, usually the first to come is the Minister of Management**, who always throws today's newspaper on my desk as soon as he enters the office, and then begins to sort out his old materials that can never be finished, or draw some charts with a ruler, I guess he is drawing a management tree or something. After reading the newspaper, everyone was all there, and the day's work officially began.

In fact, my work is very leisurely, the company's business license has not been done, so there is no need to make statements, just make some documents into vouchers, the cost can not be accounted for for the time being, and a set of warehouse management systems have not yet been established. I ran everywhere, went to the toilet one by one, went to the closed workshop to hunt for treasures, the top of our office was the library in the former factory, I searched for a number of chemical magazines in the eighties, and even found the graduation certificate of our general manager in Nanjing Chemical School in 1988, it rained a lot in summer, sometimes the rainstorm came, and I couldn't go anywhere, I stood in front of the window to watch the rain, and watched the pouring rain pour on the open space, and then flowed out of the gate along the drainage ditch, and the moist cool breeze blew into the window, at this time, I always like to imagine myself as a director of a state-owned enterprise facing the tide of reform in the 80s, and I am unmoved by the wind and rain that symbolizes the resistance to reform.

The whole morning was so boring, the only thing that was interesting was lunchtime, the cadres and masses in the factory gathered together, and they could see all the beings in the factory. Speaking of eating, it is necessary to first introduce the canteen:

The dining hall and the auditorium are connected together, it is a very tall building, the outside is overgrown with weeds as usual, the lush fig trees are full of fruit, the inside maintains the original style of the eighties, everywhere is black, in the center of the canteen there is a huge thick wooden table, which is no longer very flat, and there are some messy benches and chairs around it, and deeper is the stove, three coal-burning stoves, and a white chicken is boiling in the pot on one of the stoves, It is used to add a little water to cook chicken when stir-frying. On the wall next to the stove, there is an exhaust fan about two meters high, and the dark fan page is hung with old dirt, no matter how fast the fan blows, it will not fall. On the other side of the stove is a big case, with a lot of dishes waiting to be fried, these dishes are always the same: the roasted vegetables are duck blood tofu, the green cabbage skin belly, the stir-fried vegetables are bracts, bacon shredded meat, fried gluten, fried cauliflower, green beans and potato chips fried chicken, the dishes are all soaked in water, so they are cooked in the pot, especially the chicken pieces on the plate, which are obviously swollen by the blisters, and I suspect that it is the meat on the chicken used to cook soup. The rice consists of rice and steamed buns, which are served in large porcelain bowls in advance and placed on the table for everyone to serve, and steamed buns are placed in a styrofoam cake box and covered with a jet-black cotton mat to keep warm. Under the wall on the other side of the case, there is a green and mottled domestic refrigerator, which is no longer usable, but there is still a lot of beer, all used as a vegetable cabinet. There were three people in the cafeteria, a master and a pair of young men and women, the master was in his fifties, wearing a short-sleeved shirt and suit shorts, a pair of green liberation shoes, clean and neat, the young man was also in his thirties, with a BP machine in a leather case hanging from his waist, and the young woman was wearing a shirt and pants sewn with rayon, with thick eyebrows and eyes, and was responsible for garnish and tidying. There are not many words between them, and the work is all based on tacit understanding.

Lunch time is between half past eleven and twelve o'clock, if you go early, you can grab a bowl of rice to eat, and the dishes can also be fried earlier, if you go a little later, there is already a queue of people waiting for stir-fry in front of the stove. As usual, the workers were the first to come, wearing dirty overalls or directly barebacked, or squatting or sitting around the dining table, and everyone ordered a dish. Eat them together, and there are also those that you eat alone. What I remember the most is a chubby worker, with a canvas military belt around his waist, a thick and stiff head, black and white, walking to the case where the vegetables are placed, thinking for a while, and muttering in his mouth... I'm tired from work today... Stir-fry a chicken for me, and all the workers around him watched with admiration as he picked up the puffy chicken and put it on the plates waiting to be fried. Most people don't have the luxury to eat such a three-yuan fried chicken with beans. However, beer is to be drunk in the summer, and the master has already prepared some beer with cold water for those bold drinkers to enjoy. The work clothes of the female workers are relatively clean, most of them are in their thirties and forties, and there is no one who has a slight appearance, and the male and female workers sit in a circle, joking with each other and eating at the same time. When the workers were eating, a group of people from the factory department also arrived, men and women, neatly dressed, all holding large tea jars and lunch boxes with words printed on them, basically only one dish was fried, poured into the lunch box, took one or two steamed buns, and went back to their offices to eat slowly. I went with ** not early or late, and there were still a few dishes to eat every time, but the rice was not eaten, so I fried two dishes casually, or fried and burned, but no matter how it changed, it was all those dishes. There is not much oil, and there is not even the green and red peppers that Xuzhou people are accustomed to, but the soy sauce and salt are not stingy, and I have also eaten that famous dish, fried chicken with beans. The poor few pieces of meat let me know what it means to chew wax, and the beans and potato chips are numb, and there is only an astringent feeling in my mouth when I eat them. In contrast, I prefer to eat the greens in the belly of the green cabbage skin, and sometimes I will ask for a green vegetable egg soup, and the master has an ingenious spoonful of vinegar in the soup, which makes it taste weird, but the comrades except me still love to drink it. The last to appear is the leader of the company, the leader takes time out of his busy schedule to eat in person, in order to show the difference in identity, often not in the hall to eat, but in the back of the chef's house to eat, stir-fry and soup are available, sometimes the dish is not enough, the manager ponders, will order a few eggs to be scrambled. The strangest thing is that the factory director never eats in the canteen, and every time it is time to eat, the factory director gets into his jeep and goes nowhere, and the factory director never shows up in front of the workers. I still don't understand why a factory director who is on the verge of bankruptcy and most of the workers are so angry.

After eating, I will walk around the auditorium, the chairs have been removed, the auditorium has become a warehouse, only the wall pasted on the staff pen and word competition a piece of manuscript paper is a bit eye-catching, the wall behind the auditorium is a huge mural "The Great Wall", showing the momentum of the factory when it was most prosperous. The noon time is hot and boring, there is almost no nap time, and it is not half an hour to lie on the desk, and it is time to go to work in the afternoon, one o'clock.

In the afternoon, I was idle, and sometimes I could receive a transfer check for the purchase, so I was excited, because I could go to the bank to deliver the check, because of the long distance, I didn't have to go back to the factory, and I could take the opportunity to wander around the city. If you don't have a check, you have to wait honestly for the end of work, and you can't leave a meeting when you encounter it, and you have to be a record. I left work at about four o'clock, and it was the happiest time of the day.

This is how the ordinary days live, and it always feels like every morning through the time tunnel to 1985, and in the afternoon back to the year 2ooo, the workers and cadres are all living according to the same way of life for decades. The most painful thing is that the manager asked me to be on duty on Saturday, and I only had to read books, drink water, go to the toilet all day, and I didn't dare to go far because I had to answer the phone. The National Day holiday is also on duty, there are only a few people in the huge factory, drizzle, a person sits in the duty room, bored to the extreme, the canteen is also on holiday at noon, only to eat in the small restaurant outside, the food is more inferior than the canteen, but what can be done? If you want to find a shop city, you can also ride a 20-minute bike.

Luckily, in early November, I left the factory to work in one of the most luxurious office buildings in the middle of the city.