“Forced to Fall in Love with My Boss” Chapter 1
July is the rainy season in Suzhou and Hangzhou.
Because of the recent typhoon, heavy rain seems to come without warning.The sky is cloudy, and the air feels damp, as if it is about to rain again.
Maybe because of the weather or because it’s Monday, the whole first-floor office is very quiet.
The central air conditioning system hums softly overhead. Chi Zhi had just opened her computer and sent her weekly report to her supervisor,not even having time to close her email,when she heard Ren Man’s arrogant voice.
“Have you finished the questionnaire I asked you to do yesterday?”
It was supposed to be yesterday, but it actually happened around 11:40 pm last night.
Although Ren Man is only a few years older than Chi Zhi, she has already worked for three major internet companies.She always comes across as decisive and efficient.
“Hmm… I’m almost done. I should have it finished today.”
Chi Zhi says as she open the internal program,not daring to waste a moment.
She was genuinely afraid of Ren Man. Ever since she joined the company, the woman had never spared an intern a single kind glance.Even though it was the weekend and she was supposed to be off work, a task arrived after 11 PM. Left with no choice, she could only grit her teeth and complete it.
She desperately wanted to get a permanent position.
“Please! Can you hurry up? This is easy! I told you yesterday there’s no need for such a complicated redirection. How can you be so stupid?”
Ren Man fell silent, clicked her tongue in annoyance, and returned to the opposite workstation, where she began scrolling through her phone.
The internal company app icon in the lower-right corner of Chi Zhi’s computer flickered a few times. She opened it to find a message of encouragement from the girl at the neighboring workstation.
An Xin and she were interns who joined around the same time. Although one came from the south and the other from the north, and their university majors were completely different, they unexpectedly became friends. In this high-pressure environment, it was easy to feel a sense of camaraderie.
“You’re so pitiful. [Cracks open]”
“Isn’t she being a bit too presumptuous?” he said bitterly. “This program is meant for the simplest kind of questionnaire. The most complex one our advisor ever made only had twenty questions and two logical transitions. And she’s given you 200 requirements, along with a dozen logical transitions?Good heavens, is this something a human could create?”
Chi Zhi also felt that she was miserable.
I stayed up until 3 a.m. last night,but this morning I was shut down by a few words.
Ren Man, a former journalist ,has extremely high standards for every punctuation mark and word choice.She has her own set of ideas about wether a sentence ends with a period or an exclamation mark,and which word to use for a particular question.
But even the slightest change in a word or punctuation meant Chi Zhi had to start all over again.
She replied with a crying cat emoji.
The moment Chi Zhi pressed send, she heard Ren Man’s chair scrape against the floor. Startled, she hurriedly brought her work page back up—only to see Ren Man walking toward the break room.
She breathed a sigh of relief.
As soon as Ren Man left,An Xin’s chair slid over with a whoosh.
“Is she treating us like laborers? This is clearly a very difficult task to accomplish. Even if we just switched jobs and urgently need to achieve results, there’s no need to be so impatient.”
“It’s all a routine, a routine.”
An Xin said angrily, “Anyway, no matter what happens in the end, the credit will be hers, and if the efficiency is low, it will be the intern’s fault. We are the ones who are slowing down th e progress. She just sits there scrolling on her phone and chatting, only concerned with making requests. Maybe that’s what a leader is like.”
“And you know what, it’s all from the inside story.”
An Xin leaned in suddenly, looking around before lowering her voice. “They say she gathered all the information on the guys in the R&D department next door during her first week here. She’s been pushing us like crazy every day, yet she still has the time to do all that herself.”
Why do you need my contact information?
Chi Zhi didn’t quite understand at first and couldn’t help but ask.
“Are you stupid? Of course, we should cast a wide net! All those guys in our R&D department earn so much a year… If we just hook one of them, why would we need to be wage earners?”
Chi Zhi then realized the hidden meaning behind An Xin’s request for contact information.
Indeed, it was true. As a leading global ICT company, Hengsheng’s foundation was built on cutting-edge information and communication technologies. It was no exaggeration to say that anyone who used a mobile phone to access the internet or make a phone call was, in one way or another, connected to Hengsheng.
But that was only part of the story. In recent years, Hengsheng’s interactive entertainment sector, including its wholly owned subsidiaries in gaming, literature, film, and e-sports, had also been growing at a remarkable pace.
The office where Chi Zhi worked was not Hengsheng’s headquarters, but merely one of its branches in Suzhou and Hangzhou. Yet even as a branch, it spanned an entire area of the city, covering more ground than some university campuses.
Ever since Hengsheng set up a branch here and moved some of its entertainment and gaming operations to the district, property prices across the area had been climbing steadily.
The people in the R&D department may seem ordinary, but in reality, any one of them could easily earn a million-dollar annual salary.
However, with such good benefits, the entry requirements are naturally exceptionally high.
As a core department in a top-tier company, the industry’s unspoken rule was simple: if you weren’t from one of the top three domestic companies, you wouldn’t even pass the first interview. And even then, there were countless brutal elimination rounds still to come.