The 152 Factory Dilemma

Sister Yang mustered up her courage and said, "For instance... you could marry me!"

Hearing this, I was stunned. I had always regarded my relationship with Sister Yang as a mutual, casual affair where two consenting adults simply played around for pleasure. I had never once considered marrying her or building a family together.

Besides, it seemed she had been the one to seduce me in the first place. Now that she was proposing marriage, I fell into an awkward silence.

Refusing her would hurt her feelings, yet agreeing to her seemed entirely inappropriate.

Seeing me remain silent, Sister Yang looked somewhat dejected and said, "A-Feng, if you find this difficult, then let's forget it."

Remembering my own hasty marriage and equally swift divorce with Sister Li, I said, "Sister Yang, marriage is no child's play. We should consider it maturely before making any decisions. Otherwise, a whirlwind marriage followed by a hasty divorce will not only damage both our feelings but also ruin our reputations. Besides, your daughter might not even be willing."

Sister Yang looked desolate and replied, "What you say makes sense. Perhaps I didn't think it through."

The next morning, Sister Yang had to take her daughter to school, so she woke up rather early. As I lived at the factory and held a managerial position where—aside from the boss lady herself—my word was law in this small workshop, I had no need to wake up at the crack of dawn.

After getting up and following my usual routine of washing up, I went out to buy breakfast near the factory, taking care to pick up some of the meat buns and sausages that Lone Shadow loved to eat.

While I was having breakfast at the eatery, Ironhead called to ask if it would be all right for him to come to work today.

I said, "Come over if your body can handle it, but try not to overexert yourself. After all, recovering your health is the most important thing. There is plenty of time ahead, and money can never be fully earned."

Ironhead replied, "After resting for all these days, my bones feel uncomfortable from doing nothing. So some light physical labor would actually be good. Of course, if I truly can't handle it, I can always go back and rest."

"Very well then, come on over to work!" I told him. Fatty drove Ironhead over. Since Sister Yang hadn't returned yet after taking Xiaoya to school, I was entirely in charge of managing the factory.

Sister Yang's factory mainly produced pneumatic components, making it a small machinery workshop. There were about twenty male employees and a dozen female workers, with outsiders making up nearly half of the workforce.

Most of the male employees were machine operators working on conventional lathes, drilling machines, and aluminum die-casting machines, while the female workers handled assembly work and operated CNC lathes.

Naturally, there were also skilled CNC master technicians in the workshop responsible for technical matters, and the specific operations of the workers were overseen by shift foremen. To put it simply, I would assign the production tasks to the foremen, and they would arrange the specific execution among the operators.

After Ironhead arrived at the factory, I assigned him to the assembly line. Apart from the male assembly foreman, most of the other workers there were women, and the labor intensity was relatively low.

I had a brief word with the assembly foreman, asking him to look after Ironhead. The foreman was a man in his forties who, of course, was well aware of my ambiguous relationship with the boss lady, so he naturally chose not to offend me. He smiled and said, "Director Li, rest assured. Since he's your friend, I'll definitely take good care of him."

And so Ironhead began working on the assembly line. During his shift, I went over to check on him and asked how he was finding the work.

Ironhead was an honest and straightforward fellow. He smiled and said, "It's fine. Everyone is very kind to me. If there's something I don't know how to do, they teach me and help me out."

Hearing that, I felt much more at ease. Shortly after, Sister Yang returned from dropping her daughter off at school, and I told her, "Ironhead has started working."

Sister Yang replied, "You can make the call on that."

I asked, "What do you think would be a fair daily wage for him?"

Sister Yang explained, "Wages for assembly work are calculated by the day. Usually, it's one hundred yuan a day. Newcomers get about eighty yuan a day, while veteran workers receive one hundred and twenty. Since Ironhead is your sworn brother, we certainly can't let him suffer any losses; let's pay him the veteran rate of one hundred and twenty yuan a day."

I shook my head. "That wouldn't be right. It would cause resentment among the other workers. Let's give Ironhead one hundred yuan a day for now, and we can supplement the remaining twenty yuan as a bonus later on."

Looking somewhat absent-minded, Sister Yang replied, "Very well, you decide."

With Sister Yang's agreement, I informed Ironhead that his wage would be one hundred yuan a day. This was, of course, much lower than what he had earned at the construction site, but the work was also vastly easier.

Upon hearing this, Ironhead said the pay was already quite good and expressed his willingness to do the job. Seeing that he was content, I felt relieved.

At noon, the factory provided a very simple working lunch costing two yuan per meal. The dishes weren't fancy, but there was always enough rice to fill one's stomach. Employees didn't have to pay upfront; the meal fees were simply deducted when wages were distributed—a common practice among small factories in Mingzhou.

In the evening, Fatty drove over to pick Ironhead up. Realizing that having Fatty shuttle him back and forth every day was inconvenient, I asked for Sister Yang's permission and then arranged a dormitory room for Ironhead on the upper floor of the factory. That way, it would be much more convenient for him to go to work, and whenever he wanted to go back, he could just call Fatty to pick him up.

Time flew by, and half a month passed. I felt that my work was quite relaxed, and since Ironhead had become proficient in assembly work, I added ten yuan a day to his wages.

Ironhead was thrilled. Not only did no one bully him here, but he also hit it off remarkably well with a female colleague. That female worker was named Lan Canadie, an outsider in her early twenties with ordinary looks but great diligence in her work. Perhaps through helping each other out on the job, they had developed mutual affection. Seeing that Ironhead had taken a fancy to her, I was quite pleased as well.

Sister Yang's factory had originally been founded by her late husband, and many of the business accounts had been left behind by him.

Over the years, Sister Yang had simply stuck to convention, and the factory's business operations had remained largely unchanged.

One day, seeing Sister Yang looking glum, I asked, "What's wrong? Why so unhappy?"

Sister Yang sighed and said, "The payments for the goods we've shipped out from the factory aren't coming in."

In Sister Yang's factory, I was only responsible for managing workshop production, while sales and finance were handled entirely by Sister Yang herself, leaving me in the dark regarding the specific financial situation of the enterprise.

"What happened?" I asked.

Sister Yang beckoned me over, and I followed her into her office.

Since I frequently visited her office, I simply poured myself a cup of tea.

Sister Yang asked, "Do you remember the shipments we send to Tiansheng Company every month?"

I nodded. "We shipped three batches this month alone, worth nearly three hundred thousand yuan in total."

Having integrated into Sister Yang's business circle, I knew that Tiansheng Company was a relatively well-known pneumatic enterprise in the industry and one of the primary clients of Sister Yang's factory.

Frowning, Sister Yang said, "Tiansheng Company is withholding eight hundred thousand yuan of our payments. I've personally gone to collect it twice. At first, their finance department made excuses about waiting for the general manager's approval. But this time when I went to collect the payment, they actually claimed that our product quality was defective, and said they would only release part of the payment once the quality issues were resolved."

Since production fell under my purview, any quality issues were inherently my responsibility. Seized by worry, I asked, "Which batch of products had quality problems?"