Zheng Yang's text message was even more to the point than last time.
An address. One sentence.
“Beside the Common Sense Connect time clock. Nine sharp.”
No date, no contact person, and no explanation of what would happen if he was one minute late.
Su Ding'an wasn't about to find out.
He arrived at Basement 2 ten minutes early.
The fluorescent light in the B2 hallway was still flickering—bright, dark, bright, dark—with no consistent rhythm. Every time he thought the tube was finally about to give up the ghost, it would struggle back on, like an employee who had been past retirement age for years but still had no one to take over their shift.
The flickering made him anxious.
What made him even more anxious was that no one had submitted a repair request for such an obvious malfunction.
He was debating whether to photograph the model number on the light tube when Zheng Yang appeared around the corner.
Today she was wearing a dark gray shirt with the sleeves rolled to her elbows. She held a stack of documents under her left arm and pulled the top sheet out with her right hand. Without even bothering to say hello, she slapped it into Su Ding'an's palm.
“The Taipei Branch has 2,417 positions.”
Her voice was as fast as it had been on the phone, with no unnecessary words.
“Learn ten of them first.”
Su Ding'an lowered his head to look at the sheet.
It was packed with numbers, starting at Common-001 and continuing on to who knew where. The font was so small it felt almost vindictive. He had to hold the paper farther away before his eyes could barely focus on it.
The entire sheet hadn't even been given a large-print title. It looked exactly like an obsolete property inventory headed for the shredder.
He flipped it over.
Blank.
There was no signature field, no date field, and no familiar spot for a company seal.
At Hongchang Trading, something like this would have at least three approval boxes on the back. First, the handler. Second, the section manager. Third, the manager. After signing, it would have to be scanned and filed, with the filename formatted as “date—department—document type—serial number.” Miss one dash and the whole thing might be rejected.
Common Sense Staffing's management system clearly went to the opposite extreme.
Su Ding'an looked at the paper, then at Zheng Yang.
“Is there extra pay for learning them?”
He asked it as naturally as if he were asking whether the company party had raffle prizes.
Zheng Yang glanced at him.
Her look was about the same as the one people gave an expense report that hadn't been reimbursed yet.
“No.”
She turned and walked away.
Her heels tapped against the concrete floor with more regularity than the elevator arrival chime. After three steps, the hallway corner swallowed her whole, leaving behind neither a “good luck” nor a “let me know if you have questions.”
Su Ding'an stood there for several seconds, clutching the inventory sheet.
He remembered the words “overtime paid separately” from their first phone call and suddenly felt that those five words probably wouldn't appear in his life a second time.
Footsteps soon came from around the corner again.
This time, they were slow.
One step. Another step. The soles landed precisely on the seams between the floor tiles. The pauses between each step were exactly the same length, as if someone were keeping time for him in their head.
A middle-aged man ambled over at a glacial pace.
Underneath, he wore a blue tank top that had faded from too many washes. Over it was a khaki work vest. A name tag was clipped to his chest, its plastic surface worn white. Only a single character, Zhou, could be made out faintly.
Two ballpoint pens stuck out of the vest pocket. One had no cap, and its tip had already bled a small blue stain into the inside of the fabric.
The man stopped in front of Su Ding'an and looked him over from shoes to hair, then from hair back down to shoes.
Finally, he nodded.
The way he nodded reminded Su Ding'an of a checkmark on an acceptance form.
“You're the one covering the gravity shift?”
“That's right.”
“I'll show you the positions.”
The man patted the name tag on his chest, kicking up a tiny puff of dust.
“Just call me Old Zhou.”
Old Zhou walked about half a beat slower than Su Ding'an usually moved when slacking off at work.
He poked his head into every doorway they passed and called out,
“Morning.”
A voice inside would casually answer,
“Morning.”
It was the same as neighbors nodding to each other on their way downstairs to take out the trash. No one asked who Su Ding'an was, and no one gave him a second glance, as if people were brought in to tour the Common Sense Branch every other day.
They had walked about thirty meters before Su Ding'an slowly realized something was wrong.
The hallway was much longer than it had looked from the elevator. The walls were straight, the ceiling remained the same height, and the yellow line on the floor continued all the way ahead. Yet doors kept appearing one after another, while the end of the hallway stayed about the same distance away, as if someone were quietly filling in the space behind them as they walked.
Su Ding'an glanced back.
The elevator was still in its original position, but it had already shrunk until it looked half a floor away.
He decided not to ask yet.
There probably wouldn't be extra pay for asking, either.
There were too many signs along the way for him to read them all.
One said, “Traffic Light Seconds.” Light seeped from beneath the door, now red, now green, with an occasional brief flash of yellow in between.
Another said, “Water Flows Downhill.” The door was closed, but a faint sound of water came from inside, sometimes like a stream, sometimes like someone had forgotten to turn off a faucet.
On the next one, he only had time to catch the words “Sunrise” before Old Zhou led him past.
A smaller sign hung beneath it, written in red:
“This position operates on rotating shifts by segment. For inquiries, dial extension 237.”
Su Ding'an instinctively memorized 237.
After four years in administration, he couldn't stop himself from memorizing every extension number he saw.
The first room they stopped at officially had a small sign hanging beside the door.
“You'll Find the Key Eventually.”
The typeface was the standard Kai font used in official documents, meticulous down to the spacing, as if every gap had been measured with a ruler.
One entire wall of the room was covered in keys.
Thousands of them, large and small.
Some were brass, some silver, and some wrapped in red or blue plastic shells. A few had long-faded cartoon keychains attached. One looked like it belonged to a ship's cabin door; its sheer size took up an entire section of half the wall.
Near the ceiling hung a key with only half of it left, its broken edge black with rust.
A female duty officer with her hair tied in a ponytail stood on a small stool, hanging the keys back on the wall one by one.
Her movements were quick and steady. She never once stopped to compare them against a list.
Old Zhou lifted his chin toward her.
“This is the new guy.”
The female duty officer turned to look at Su Ding'an without stopping her hands.
“Oh. Hi.”
“Hi.”
Su Ding'an stood in the doorway, staring at the wall.
The sheer number of keys reminded him of the numbers in his reports that never lined up properly. He estimated roughly that with a thousand keys at three seconds apiece, hanging them all would take fifty minutes.
And that didn't include figuring out which slot each key belonged in.
“Don't you get tired doing this every day?”
He asked it offhandedly.
The female duty officer hung up the last small key and stepped down from the stool.
“Not really.”
She dusted off her hands.
“The annoying part is when someone throws a key into the ocean.”
Su Ding'an waited for her to continue.
Instead, she bent down to put the stool back against the wall, then picked up a rag and wiped the spot where she'd been standing before slowly continuing.
“Then I have to figure out how to make sure he really finds it in the ocean eventually, but not too quickly.”
“Why can't it be too quickly?”
“If it's too quick, he won't believe it was a coincidence.”
She turned the rag over.
“He'll go back and look for the reason. If he can't find one, he'll keep looking. That actually makes the case harder to close.”
Su Ding'an froze for half a second.
His first thought was whether this requirement could be written into a job description.
His second was who would approve the line that said, “Arrange for the owner to visit the seaside within a reasonable timeframe.”
“What if he just refuses to go to the seaside?”
He couldn't help asking.
The female duty officer raised her head from behind the rag.
Her expression suggested that countless new hires had asked her this exact question.
“Then we wait.”
She hung the rag back on the hook by the wall.
“He'll go someday.”
“What if he never goes in his entire life?”
“Then we send his family, or whoever receives his belongings.”
She said it calmly.
“There’s only one deadline on my end: it has to be found eventually. It doesn't say how many years that can take, and it doesn't require the original person to be the one who finds it.”
Su Ding'an was silent for two seconds, translating the sentence into terms he was familiar with.
Case closure deadline: undetermined. Case closure rate: must be 100 percent.
Old Zhou was already heading toward the next room.
Su Ding'an hurried after him.
The sign outside the second room read:
“Instant Noodles: Exactly Three Minutes.”
The room wasn't large, but more than a dozen types of water heaters, kettles, and water dispensers lined the walls. The table in the center was covered with timers—digital, mechanical, and phone apps. There was even an hourglass currently leaking sand downward.
A man in a convenience-store uniform stood at the table, muttering at a pot of freshly boiled water.
The kettle clicked. He immediately hit the stopwatch and fixed his eyes on the jumping seconds.
“Season changes are such a pain.”
He complained to Old Zhou without looking up.
“Water cools faster in winter, so I have to watch it more closely. Otherwise someone ends up with two minutes and fifty seconds, and the complaint says I undercooked their noodles.”
Old Zhou nodded sympathetically.
“Tough job.”
Standing beside them, Su Ding'an automatically started calculating the workload.
If this man watched for eight hours a day, and each bowl took three minutes, then a single shift had to handle at least 160 three-minute intervals.
And he couldn't get distracted at any point. There was no peak-hour differential, no shift allowance, and little chance he'd ever hear the words “overtime paid separately.”
He suddenly wanted to ask about the man's pay structure.
But when the question reached his lips, he felt it would be rude to ask at their first meeting and forced it back down.
“What if people all over Taiwan are making noodles at the same time?”
He switched to a safer question.
The man finally moved his gaze from the stopwatch.
He looked at Su Ding'an the way someone looked at a new hire who had asked an extremely basic question.
“Then it's all at the same time.”
He stopped one stopwatch, reset it, and immediately started another.
“Three minutes is three minutes. It doesn't become four just because there are more people. That's how this line is drawn.”
“What if someone makes two bowls?”
“Two lines.”
“What if they open the lid to peek halfway through?”
“That’s an individual action. It’s not my responsibility.”
After saying that, the man lowered his head and went back to watching the stopwatch.
Su Ding'an nodded.
So this position had no peak hours, no off-peak hours, and no queueing system. It operated year-round, handled everything in real time, and was always at capacity.
He had seen this kind of work assignment at Hongchang Trading.
Usually, whoever had it quit before six months were up.
A few steps farther on was a small room plastered with bus route maps.
Maps of Taipei from different eras hung on the walls. Some were so old they didn't even show the MRT lines. Inside, a man in a baseball cap was frowning at a whiteboard.
The board was covered in schedules. Three routes had been circled heavily in red, so forcefully that the tip had nearly scratched the surface.
Old Zhou knocked on the doorframe.
“This is the bus shift.”
The man turned around, his eyes carrying the guilty look of someone caught in the act.
Su Ding'an looked at the three circled routes.
“You're the one who makes three buses arrive together every time?”
He couldn't stop himself from asking first.
The man scratched the back of his head.
“Yeah. I messed up the roster.”
He admitted it as frankly as if he had merely entered one wrong cell in a spreadsheet, not made an entire line of passengers wait twenty extra minutes beneath a bus stop sign.
“Can't you change it?”
“Sure.”
The man shrugged and turned back to the whiteboard. He erased the edge of one line with the eraser, then drew it back in with the red marker.
“But if I change it, people won't be used to it.”
“What won't they be used to?”
“Complaining about three buses arriving together is more reassuring.”
He nodded after saying it, as if it were a conclusion validated by polling.
Su Ding'an stood there for several seconds, digesting the statement.
He suddenly realized something.
From the moment he entered the Common Sense Branch until now, no one had shown the slightest surprise at anything supernatural.
They cared about whether the duty roster was correct, how to close a case when a key fell into the ocean, and whether water cooling too quickly would lead to a complaint.
No one was astonished that “the key would definitely be found.”
They were only astonished when a list hadn't been sent, a schedule didn't match, or a process might invite questions later.
In essence, it seemed no different from the half-day arguments at Hongchang Trading over a single payment request.
The only difference was that if a process was missed here, the consequences weren't limited to closing the books at the end of the month. They affected instant noodles and buses across all of Taiwan.
Old Zhou seemed to know what he was thinking.
He smiled without explaining and kept walking.
Following behind him, Su Ding'an finally found an opening.
“What position do you have?”
Old Zhou kept walking without looking back.
“The time clock.”
“You manage everyone's time punches here?”
“Not just here.”
Old Zhou raised a hand toward the ceiling, then casually swept it in a circle ahead of them.
“Factories, companies, schools—anywhere people punch in on time, anywhere being one minute late counts as tardy, anywhere someone arrives but the machine won't let them clock in. I have something to do with all of it.”
He paused, then added one more sentence.
He said it as casually as if he were stating his zodiac sign.
“I’m on one-year contracts too. I’ve signed forty of them.”
Su Ding'an's steps faltered for half a beat.
One-year contracts.
Forty times.
That made forty years.
If each one was as thick as his own temp contract, stacking forty of them would be enough to build a little wall on a desk.
And he had only signed his own contract once. The crease on the cover was still fresh, and he hadn't even softened the binding at page thirty-nine, where it said, “A replacement may not leave the position unless someone takes over the shift.”
Su Ding'an quickly suppressed the strange feeling.
What came to mind instead was the practical accounting problem.
Signing a one-year contract forty times meant updating personnel records forty times, undergoing forty annual physicals, and completing forty rounds of training. Even without thinking too hard, he knew Human Resources must have collapsed several times over.
Over those forty years, the person handling the paperwork might have retired, the system might have gone through three generations, and no one knew how many versions the contract template had seen.
They would also have had to deal with how to combine years of service, how to accumulate annual leave, and whether he technically counted as a fixed-term or indefinite-term employee.
“Have you never taken time off?”
Su Ding'an asked.
Old Zhou shook his head, then seemed to remember something and changed it to a nod.
“I have.”
“How long?”
“One day.”
Old Zhou said it as calmly as if he were talking about when the convenience store restocked its oden.
“Someone covered for me that day. Halfway through, they ran off.”
“And then?”
“Then I came back.”
Old Zhou spread his hands.
“So I stopped taking time off after that.”
Su Ding'an's mind instantly flipped to page thirty-nine of the temp contract.
The rule that said “A replacement may not leave the position unless someone takes over the shift” suddenly became more vivid than the sign outside the gravity duty room with half its letters missing.
He opened his mouth to ask what had happened to the person who ran off halfway through the shift.
The question reached his lips, then he swallowed it back.
Somehow, it felt even ruder than asking about the man's pay on their first meeting.
What finally came out was something else.
“How long are you planning to keep doing this?”
Old Zhou stopped.
This time, he wasn't merely walking slowly. His entire body had truly come to a halt.
Even the hand he had raised halfway hung forgotten in the air.
From deep in the hallway came the sound of some machine operating with mechanical regularity: click, click, click, like countless second hands jumping forward together behind the walls.
Old Zhou stared at Su Ding'an for two seconds.
Then he slowly broke into a smile.
“You’re the first person who’s ever asked me that.”
From the innermost pocket of his work vest, he pulled out a photograph.
The edges had been worn white, and a faint crease ran through the middle. It was clear the photo had been taken out and put away many times.
Old Zhou handed it to Su Ding'an.
The photograph showed an old-fashioned time clock.
It had a beige metal casing and a dark card slot, and the clock face had yellowed with age. The hands were stopped at a position Su Ding'an couldn't make out. A small patch of window light reflected off the glass.
The background was a concrete wall and part of an iron gate, looking like the side entrance of some old factory. A duty roster was nailed to the wall, but the text was too small to tell who worked the morning shift and who worked nights.
A line of tiny writing in blue ballpoint covered the back of the photograph.
The handwriting had been rubbed nearly away by someone's fingers. Only what looked like a date at the beginning could still be made out faintly.
Old Zhou looked at the photograph, his eyes a little more serious than before.
“Beautiful, isn't it?”
Su Ding'an lowered his head and looked again.
It was just a very old time clock.
The paint had peeled from the metal casing, the edge of the card slot was worn down, and there was even a crooked maintenance sticker on the lower-left corner. At a secondhand shop, it probably wouldn't sell for enough to cover shipping.
But he didn't say that.
“Yeah.”
He turned the photograph faceup again.
“Is this where you used to work?”
Old Zhou shook his head.
When he reached for the photograph, his hand paused.
“No.”
He carefully tucked it back into the innermost pocket, then patted the surface of his vest flat with his palm.
“That was where I punched in for the first time.”
Old Zhou raised his head and looked toward the endless hallway ahead.
“It was different.”
Su Ding'an didn't ask what was different.
He suddenly felt that this might be the one thing Old Zhou had never handed over to Human Resources for filing in forty years.
Old Zhou patted him on the shoulder, signaling him to keep moving.
Farther down the hallway, another door stood lit.
Su Ding'an lowered his head and found the number of the position in front of them on the inventory sheet, then lightly pressed a mark into the paper with his fingernail.
Four out of 2,417.
There were 2,413 left to learn.
And of the ten Zheng Yang had assigned him today, he had only finished four.
He followed Old Zhou toward the next door, still thinking about the most practical question of all.
So far, no one had told him whether the time spent learning positions counted as work hours.
The inventory sheet had no signature field and no training record.
There was also nowhere to prove that he had arrived before nine that morning.
The more Su Ding'an thought about it, the less settled he felt. In the end, he spoke.
“Old Zhou.”
“Yeah?”
“I clocked in at nine just now, right?”
Old Zhou turned around.
For the first time, his expression showed a touch of genuine professional confidence.
“You did.”
He patted the name tag on his chest, whose lettering was no longer legible.
“You can relax about that.”
“In forty years, I’ve never shorted anyone even a minute.”