I was explaining physics to my daughter.
She had missed one of those ancient, over-polished textbook questions that has probably been passed down through generations of exam papers:
When Xiao Ming climbs up a pole at a constant speed, the friction force is __ gravity. When Xiao Ming slides down the pole at a constant speed, the friction force is ____ gravity.
Fill in: greater than, less than, or equal to.
My approach to explaining problems has always been simple and brutal.
“Once you see ‘constant speed,’ the problem is basically over. Constant speed means the forces are balanced. In this problem there are only two forces.”
Then I saw her face twist into the expression of someone who had just been served shredded carrot with ginger juice and cilantro.
“You don’t understand how it can be constant speed, right? I didn’t get it when I was in school either. When someone climbs a pole, it’s obviously in jerks, not smooth. But back then your Uncle Xiao explained it to me like this: imagine it’s your Uncle Xu climbing the pole, and the person writing the problem only looks once every three seconds. Then he can’t see the jerking. So it counts as constant speed.”
“No, Dad,” she said. “My question is: what is pole climbing? How do you climb one?”
Our department head has had an extremely cursed week.
Two female colleagues got into an argument in the elevator over which side owned a certain bug. The argument escalated until they were pulling each other’s hair. When the elevator doors opened, they happened to run straight into a vice president escorting a group of Japanese clients upstairs.
Naturally, responsibility landed on the department head.
Normally, although this kind of thing is not common, there is a process. The department head talks to the project manager, the project manager talks to the project leader, and the leader talks to the team members. Done.
But the project manager was on a business trip, and the project leader was in the hospital. So the department head had to step in personally and mediate.
To be fair, both women had decent attitudes afterward. The real problem was that the senior leadership saw the whole thing. It was embarrassing.
The next day, another colleague from another project, Meng-chan, got into a car accident on her way to work.
Her roommate was driving. A car on the right forced its way into their lane. The roommate did not yield. The airbags went off. The car was basically totaled. Meng-chan was in the passenger seat and suffered a comminuted fracture in her right arm, broken ribs, and a cracked cheekbone.
Under normal circumstances, the car that crossed a solid line to merge would be 100 percent responsible. But then again, under normal circumstances, who the hell forces a merge across a big solid line inside a tunnel?
Anyway, the other driver insisted, “You were speeding too,” refused to take full responsibility, and demanded that they settle it in court.
From a third-party perspective, my guess is that the two sides were probably locked in some kind of road-rage contest.
Meng-chan’s family rushed in from out of town and grabbed the department head downstairs to ask about work-related injury procedures.
The department head had actually done a lot of homework in advance. He had not only looked into how primary and secondary responsibility in a traffic accident affects work injury compensation, but had also spoken with the roommate ahead of time to coordinate how to conceal from Meng-chan’s parents that she is a lesbian.
Earlier I said the project leader was in the hospital. That was not quite accurate.
More precisely, the guy attended his daughter’s parent-teacher meeting the Friday before last. That night, after he got home, he suddenly had a cerebral hemorrhage. He spent nine days in the ICU. Yesterday, Sunday, he died.
His family had come to the company on Friday, hoping the company might offer some help. The department head had been thinking about how to raise some money for them. Before he had even figured out the wording, the task changed into writing a eulogy.
The company has more than a thousand employees, but in our industry people still don’t die that often. I’ve been working for twenty years and have only run into this once. As for the procedures for applying for condolence payments and funeral subsidies, there really aren’t many people who can explain them clearly. The department head and project manager were both drowning in problems.
The good news is that the two hair-pulling colleagues have completely made up. They are now full of energy, enthusiastically discussing what to wear to tomorrow’s funeral, how much condolence money to give, whether makeup is appropriate, and where to park.
As for the colleague who died, he was the same age as me, a few months older.
He had been with the company for more than fifteen years. The first time we sat in the same development room, he asked me, “You were in the same high school class as XXX, right? He was my college roommate.”
Yes. XXX was not only my classmate. He also borrowed 1,200 yuan from me more than twenty years ago and never paid it back.
So I had always avoided dealing too much with this colleague.
Maybe if he had said one more sentence — “That bastard XXX owes me money too and never paid me back” — we would have become good friends.
Cherish life. Exercise regularly. Eat healthy. Go to bed early and get up early. Start with yourself.
And if you can’t manage that, at least try to let your wife attend more parent-teacher meetings instead.