Working Prophet

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 8 o'clock in the evening, and sent the finished third version of the plan to the immediate superior by the group mailbox, and at the same time sent a copy to the department leader according to the regulations.

Five minutes later, I received a reply from my boss, asking 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 there would be a regular meeting of the department tomorrow morning, which would take at least an hour and a half, which meant that he would have at most two hours to continue working on the plan, and his work summary and follow-up The work plan for a cycle has not yet been written.

So he took 20 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 continued to write 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 superior had just left the office, took the elevator to the underground parking lot, and drove home.

So Li Yu also turned off the computer, put on his backpack, and prepared to leave work.

When he clocked in at the time attendance machine, half of the people in the department hadn't left. The blue light emitted by the ips screen was reflected on their faces, making them look a little dull.

At the same time, most floors of another office building across the road were still lit.

Li Yu's company is on the sixth and seventh floors of Block A. Li Yu glanced at the elevators. Three of the four elevators have stopped, and one is on the twenty-sixth floor right now. He didn't want to wait any longer, so he directly Go downstairs through the safe passage on the side.

As a result, when I went down to the fourth floor, I heard a faint sob.

Li Yu didn't see the owner of the voice, so he could only guess that the voice came from the platforms on the first and second floors.

The voice sounds like that of a girl. I was on the phone with my family, crying while calling.

"I can't hold on any longer...I have been here for three months after graduation, and I have only worked overtime for seven days in total...I work at least twelve hours a day, and I leave all the work to me. The leader gave me the score of the group The lowest, training me in front of everyone is like training a dog. Mom, I'm really tired..."

Li Yu didn't want the other party to be embarrassed, so he quietly exited the corridor and changed to another safe passage.

This time I didn't meet anyone else.

Li Yu went downstairs smoothly, walked out of the gate, crossed the small square in front of the office building diagonally, turned right onto the crosswalk, and smelled a fragrance within a few steps.

The area around here is basically full of office buildings, and the most indispensable thing is people who work the evening shift.

So the itinerant vendors who smelled the business opportunities all rode tricycles, pulled gas tanks, and swarmed over. Every night after nine o'clock in the evening, there were all kinds of food stalls on the side of the road, such as rice noodles, rolls, fried rice, etc. Chicken chops... everything.

At this moment, most of the urban management have also rested, and they don't have to hide anymore, it's a good time to do business.

Li Yu ate the leftover half bag of bread in the morning for dinner at five o'clock in the afternoon, and just now he was a little hungry again, so he bought a box of vegetarian fried noodles for eight yuan.

After scanning the QR code to pay, he continued to walk forward with the hot fried noodles.

Li Yu's place of work is on the edge of the North Fourth Ring Road, but the rented house is outside the East Fifth Ring Road.

There is still a little distance in between. The commute time by subway is one hour and twenty minutes on weekdays, especially in the morning rush hour, and you have to go out 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 could be cheaper, Li Yu signed a two-year contract at the time.

Originally, the place where he worked could be reached in 30 minutes by car, but since he switched to the current company a year ago, it took even longer time on the road.

Fortunately, it's not too long to be unacceptable.

After working for a long time after graduation, Li Yu found that there were fewer and fewer things 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 are men and women.

To be honest, the white-collar workers working in this CBD are generally pretty good-looking.

Especially women, many of them have fitness, maintain a good body shape, and their makeup is more powerful than the other. Even in a crowded subway, they can still draw their eyebrows steadily, and they can easily wear them no matter if they are forest, 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 alternately scrolled on the rectangular light box behind them.

Ten minutes later, Ye No. 6 bus came into the station.

Li Yu and several others swiped their cards one after another to get on the bus, found an empty seat and sat down.

Many people may assume that buses traveling through the city will be empty late at night, but this is not the case.

Passengers on the night bus are very complicated. In addition to migrant workers like Li Yu and others who work overtime until late, there are also surrogate drivers with small cars and scalpers who carry sleeping bags and are ready to grab shoes, bags, and houses. They wear cool clothes to go. Young people dancing and drinking in nightclubs, or out-of-towners with sad faces bringing their children to big cities for medical treatment...

In winter, homeless people scavenging will 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 don't get off until the final station. They sit for a whole day. Circle, the time is about two hours.

It was also the cheapest way they could find heating 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.

Ye 6 Road is driving unhurriedly in the steel forest built of reinforced concrete.

The same trajectory is repeated day after day, just like Li Yu and most of the people who live in this city.

Li Yu didn't know when it started, 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 decline of communication desire 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.

But after entering the workplace, Li Yu became less and less talkative every 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 seem to be righteous on the surface and complain about the company's unreasonable system with everyone are secretly the eyeliner of a certain leader.

Be cautious in words and deeds, watch more and talk less is the first workplace survival rule that Li Yu learned.

As for curiosity, Li Yu also took the weird written test in the Third Age in the afternoon and suddenly realized that he hadn't 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. of limited help.

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. Profit stuff.

But you can't blame modern people for being too ignorant and boring, because most people are already struggling just to live.

Those experts and scholars are always screaming on the Internet all day long, saying that short videos, fast food literature and junk mobile games are ruining a generation.

However, they intentionally or unintentionally ignored why all this happened.

When you work overtime for several weeks in a row and return home exhausted and dizzy, does your already overwhelmed brain want to be baptized by poetry and art masterpieces, or is it more willing to find some black stockings and have a great time? Go up?

In fact, Li Yu hasn't even played stand-alone games for a long time. Even though it's the discount season, he will subconsciously stock up on this year's masterpieces.

But after the download and installation of those games was completed, they were put into the hard disk, quietly eating ashes.

Even when watching a movie, Li Yu began to fast-forward at double speed.

Of course he wanted to escape from such a life, but he didn't know where to escape.

If you want to settle in this city, you need to buy a house, and if you want to buy a house, you have to work hard. No matter which company you switch to, overtime is almost inevitable.

And when you work overtime and suffer from occupational diseases, you will 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 public examination.

Unfortunately, other people also think the same way, so the difficulty of public examination is getting bigger and bigger every year.

In some cities, the street offices and police assistants all started as postgraduates.

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, Kaogong is still a very good way out for the vast majority of young people wandering on the front line, including Li Yu.

It's just that Li Yu had to face another problem - if the feeling of being trapped doesn't 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 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 the 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 and bloody flesh was completely embedded in the gap, and could no longer move.