"Old Zhang, what are you looking at? You're so engrossed!" In a public institution, Wang Yizhou, 52 years old, holding a thermos and a stack of newspapers, ambled into the office for work.
It was fifteen minutes past the official start time, meaning Wang Yizhou was fifteen minutes late.
However, Wang Yizhou didn't feel there was anything wrong with this. In fact, he often felt ashamed because Old Zhang, Zhang Yibo, who sat opposite him, was late by more than thirty minutes almost every day, and would leave thirty minutes early. Moreover, he never received any scolding from the leadership, always appearing calm and collected. This made Wang Yizhou feel inferior.
He was too afraid of trouble, always worried about being discovered by a randomly checking leader. Unlike Zhang Yibo, who always timed it perfectly, calculating when the leader would definitely inspect within half an hour of starting work, and always arriving just in time.
Even if he was discovered by a leader once in a while, he would just smile, offer a self-criticism, and get away with it. Wang Yizhou felt he was far inferior in this art of coasting.
But today, when Wang Yizhou arrived at the office, he was surprised to find Old Zhang, Zhang Yibo, already sitting at his workstation, having even turned on his computer and was operating something on it.
"I say, Old Zhang, has the sun risen from the west today? You're actually using a computer proactively. Didn't you say it's the most damned thing in the world, the worst invention?" Wang Yizhou asked, surprised by this sight.
The unit had started promoting paperless offices a year ago, and soon each office staff member was allocated a computer. It was said that each computer cost over ten thousand yuan, a Lenovo computer.
But for some reason, these Lenovo computers, worth tens of thousands of yuan, took three to four minutes just to boot up, and often suffered from blue screen errors. His son, who graduated with a computer science degree, occasionally visited his company and, after operating Old Wang's computer, would curse, calling it trash, comparing it to a ten-year-old configuration, and saying it wasn't even worth a thousand yuan.
Wasn't Lenovo a domestic brand? The pride of the domestic computer industry? It was worth ten thousand yuan, so how could it be worse than a thousand yuan?
Actually, Wang Yizhou also hated computers. This thing was simply too difficult to operate. He spent a whole week just learning to turn it on and still couldn't do it.
Later, the company even organized everyone to attend Wubi input method training classes, requiring them to use their off-duty time and weekends to learn Wubi typing. Wang Yizhou considered it the most painful three months of his life, nearly making him lose the little hair he had on his head.
After all, the Wubi character table, once memorized, was soon forgotten. Wang Yizhou felt he hadn't suffered as much when he was taking his high school entrance exams.
But even so, Wang Yizhou only learned a little bit of simple Wubi typing, barely enough to type around a hundred frequently used characters. However, this wasn't the most frustrating part when using it.
The most frustrating thing was that many times, upon starting up, Wang Yizhou would press the keyboard, and only English letters would appear instead of the familiar Wubi input method boxes. Wang Yizhou wouldn't know what to do. The Wubi input method from the training classes was the default input method that appeared as soon as you started typing.
In fact, Wang Yizhou's computer was also set to the Wubi input method by default. But for some reason, a few times every month, the computer would act up and reset to the English input method or something similar.
Helplessly, Wang Yizhou had to ask the young people in the unit to help him reset it.
This was just a minor problem Wang Yizhou encountered. Whenever he operated the computer, he would encounter over a dozen unsolvable problems daily, requiring him to call the young people in the unit for help.
Finally, Wang Yizhou decided to simply stop using the computer. He would push back computer-related tasks whenever possible, and if it was unavoidable, he would just hand them over to the young people. After all, these young people were very respectful of their "iron rice bowls" and dared not offend senior employees like Wang Yizhou. xxs 1
Later, these incidents became more frequent. The leadership finally learned their lesson and reallocated tasks, assigning all computer-related work to the younger employees. Wang Yizhou's job became almost entirely unrelated to computers.
Zhang Yibo's situation was even worse than Wang Yizhou's. Wang Yizhou occasionally turned on his computer once or twice a month, but Zhang Yibo hadn't turned on his computer in three months.
One reason was that he didn't know how to operate a computer. More importantly, Zhang Yibo's son was in his final year of high school but constantly skipped class to go to internet cafes. His life was almost ruined. Zhang Yibo deeply hated computers and vowed never to touch one.
Whether it was Wang Yizhou or Zhang Yibo, their computers had been turned on only a handful of times in recent months, becoming almost mere decorations.
To Wang Yizhou's surprise, when he arrived at the company, he saw Zhang Yibo operating the computer, even looking intently at the dusty keyboard surface and typing letters one word at a time.
Wang Yizhou was completely bewildered.
"Don't mention it. My wife asked me to do it!" Zhang Yibo immediately sighed upon hearing Wang Yizhou's question and began to vent to Wang Yizhou. "My wife spotted a set of clothes called 'Watery Sky, One Color' online. She heard it can only be bought online, so she insisted I learn how to shop online and buy it for her!"
"Oh, Sister-in-law is so fashionable now, she's learned to shop online? What kind of clothes are so charming? Are they particularly beautiful and also very cheap?" Wang Yizhou asked with a smile.
"Don't mention it. With your sister-in-law's figure, any clothes would be superfluous. She might not even be able to wear them. The price is also outrageous, costing a full 100 yuan!"
"Spending 100 yuan on clothes! Old Zhang, you're too open-minded!" Wang Yizhou exclaimed.
"Hey, if you could buy it for 100 yuan, that would be great. Apparently, this 100 yuan is just for buying 10 boxes, and there's only a 1% chance of getting this outfit inside!" Zhang Yibo sighed.
"What? Isn't this a scam? Old Zhang, you can't let your wife mess around with this. Money shouldn't be wasted like this!" Wang Yizhou immediately said.
"Alas, you can't say that. When have you ever seen your sister-in-law do something that loses money?" Zhang Yibo chuckled. "Firstly, this outfit is incredible. It's now selling for 2,000 yuan on the website, and it's always out of stock, sold out as soon as it's released! Based on a 1% chance, if you spend 1,000 yuan, you can get an outfit worth 2,000 yuan. Isn't that a double profit?"
"But that doesn't make sense either. On average, you need about 100 boxes to have a chance to get one. You're only buying 10 boxes, so the probability is still very small!" Wang Yizhou said.
"More than that. My son will also buy 10 boxes. He's also got over a dozen accounts for us, saying that by changing accounts every 5 minutes, we can buy another 10 boxes. This way, we can buy 100 boxes in total."
"If we can get one outfit, we'll earn 1,000 yuan. If we're lucky and get two or three, we'll get rich! Earning a month's salary for free!!" Zhang Yibo said.
"But what if you don't get it!" Wang Yizhou advised. "Old Zhang, you need to think carefully. This 1% chance doesn't mean you'll definitely get one out of 100 boxes. If you don't get anything, you'll only be crying."
"Bad luck!" Zhang Yibo glared at Wang Yizhou and said, "Don't worry, my son said that even if you don't get the 2,000 yuan outfit from this box, there's still a 10% chance of getting a leather jacket, or a down jacket, or a suit, or a coat."
"Aren't these clothes worth at least 100 yuan each? You can break even, right!"
"Also, it's said that each box at least contains a shirt, or a pair of underwear, or 5 pairs of socks. These things, bought at any store, would cost around 10 yuan!"
"Do you think I'm losing money?" Zhang Yibo asked.
"There's such a profitable thing in the world, it can't be true!" Wang Yizhou exclaimed.
"Nothing is impossible. Do you know Jiangnan Group? That's the company of the heroic firefighter Huang He. This is their product, so it must be correct. Such a big boss, and also a heroic firefighter, he wouldn't deceive us. My son said many of his classmates are loyal users of Jiangnan Blind Boxes. They've been buying for over a year, and there's never been a scam. They've always sold like this!"
"Also, my wife actually started buying blind boxes at Jiangnan's store six months ago. Now, all our daily necessities, meat, nuts, walnuts, etc., are bought from Jiangnan Blind Boxes. My wife says that since this Jiangnan Blind Box store opened, our household expenses for daily necessities have been reduced by at least 300 yuan a month... It's just that, for some reason, we don't seem to save any money each month!" Zhang Yibo mumbled.
"Is that true? Impossible!" Wang Yizhou was shocked.
"It's true. Before, my wife used to buy from offline stores. But this time, she insisted on selling online. Although they offer free home delivery, it's still quite troublesome. If my wife hadn't forced me, I wouldn't be bothering with this!" Zhang Yibo chattered on, then continued to study the colorful instruction manual.
Wang Yizhou felt he couldn't just sit still. That evening, as soon as work ended, he dragged his wife to the Jiangnan Blind Box store to inquire. He tentatively bought a few grocery blind boxes.
Upon opening them, although they were all ten-pound bags of rice, and ten yuan could buy ten pounds of rice, this was a sure profit!
As a result, Wang Yizhou was fine, but Wang Yizhou's wife got hooked. The next day, she bought several hundred yuan worth of blind boxes. By sheer luck, she actually got an air conditioner, which was a huge success.
So, Wang Yizhou called over the child from his next-door neighbor. "Liu Chuanye, come here. Tell Uncle, what's this 'one color blind box' thing about?"
Then, the next day, Wang Yizhou started studying how to shop online using the colorful instruction manual on the company computer.
[PS: After finishing this chapter, I realized the word count is too high, meaning this chapter is quite watery. However, to guarantee the minimum VIP update of 4,000 characters per day, this chapter is still a VIP paid chapter. But tomorrow's first chapter will be a chapter appreciation, which is a free chapter. I apologize, this chapter is so watery that I can't even stand it myself.]