The next morning, Su Ding'an didn’t go to Hongchang Trading.
He took a half day of annual leave.
In his four years at the company, it was the first time he had taken time off to figure something out.
In the past, his reasons for taking leave had been limited to the dentist, the motor vehicle office, and one time when his refrigerator broke and he had to sit in the living room waiting for a repairman who had only said, “I’ll be there in the afternoon,” without specifying what time.
That time, Su Ding'an waited from one o’clock until six-thirty. The repairman finally rang the doorbell at 6:28.
So Su Ding'an had always believed that the least reliable unit of time in the world wasn’t “later.” It was “the afternoon.”
But today was different.
He had barely slept the night before.
Every time he closed his eyes, that gravity duty room would automatically surface in his mind, followed by the white motorcycle weighing 103.7 kilograms, the 214 grams of soy milk, and the hundreds of numbers from the entire street all forcing their way into his head at once.
Then, in the very next second, came that transfer text.
NT$1,860.
Three hours.
Su Ding'an turned over four times in bed. In the end, he sat up, opened the calculator on his phone, and ran the numbers again.
An hourly wage of NT$620.
The number didn’t get smaller just because it was two in the morning.
Nor did it refuse to add up just because the job was obviously abnormal.
So he simply got up and dug a notebook out of his desk drawer.
It was a lined notebook that had cost fifty-nine dollars at a stationery store. The cover was plain, the paper wasn’t very thick, and pressing too hard with a ballpoint pen would bleed through to the back.
The front third was already filled with meeting notes from Hongchang Trading.
“Third-Quarter Quote Review,” “Warehouse Rent Adjustment,” “Items Assigned by Manager Wei.” Every page had a date in the upper-right corner, and the last few lines usually listed who was responsible, when it was due, and whether it needed follow-up.
Su Ding'an started writing on the first blank page in the middle.
First, he wrote down the date.
Then he drew a line.
After that, he listed the questions one by one.
Why was he the only one who could see things floating?
After the text was sent but before he clocked in, did that count as work?
Exactly how broad was the temporary access?
Could he leave while on shift?
What if he needed to use the bathroom?
What if his phone rang?
What if he sneezed?
What if two streets had problems at the same time?
If someone passed out, would gravity clock out too?
He paused when he reached the last question. It looked a little too much like a curse, so he added “hypothetical only” beside it.
By the time he finished, he had filled two and a half pages.
At eight in the morning, he left the house with the notebook.
The Staffing Division at Common Sense’s Taipei branch was on the other side of Basement 2, separated from the gravity duty room by two corridors and a keycard door.
There was no sign outside the door, only a sheet of A4 paper printed in standard Kai font: “Temporary staff, please take a number first.”
A transparent plastic box sat beside the ticket dispenser. There was only one number left inside.
It was marked 007.
Su Ding'an pulled it out and waited in the doorway for more than ten seconds. When he heard no number being called, he poked his head inside.
There were only three people in the entire office.
At the very back, someone was saying into the phone, “The sunset shift already has someone covering it.” The person on the left was measuring the width of a form column with a ruler. By the window sat Zheng Yang.
There was an old monitor on her desk, its casing thick as a small television.
Three file racks stood beside the monitor, stuffed with kraft-paper folders. Each spine had a white label, all neatly handwritten, with the dates arranged in perfect order from newest to oldest.
A red stamp sat in the corner of the desk, with a tissue folded into a square beneath it, as if to keep the ink pad from staining the desktop.
Zheng Yang looked up and saw him. Her eyes paused for roughly half a second on the notebook in his hand.
“You’re not on shift today.”
“I know.”
Su Ding'an placed ticket 007 on her desk, opened the notebook, and flipped directly to the page covered in questions.
“There’s something I want to ask.”
Zheng Yang glanced at the clock on the wall.
8:47.
She pushed the stack of forms beside her out of the way.
“Five minutes.”
Su Ding'an looked down at his two and a half pages of questions.
Divided evenly across five minutes, that gave him less than twenty seconds per question.
He immediately circled the three most important ones and decided to start with the one that bothered him most.
“Why was everything on the entire floor floating, but I was the only one who thought something was wrong?”
Zheng Yang didn’t look confused.
So Su Ding'an described the scene from that afternoon again.
Ms. Wang had continued her phone call while holding a coffee cup suspended in midair.
Manager Wei had pressed a button on a presentation remote floating in the air, and the slides had continued advancing normally.
The arm of the coworker beside him had passed beneath a floating ballpoint pen without even looking up.
The cleaning lady had casually nudged the paper cup floating in the hallway to the side so her cart could pass.
He paused there.
“She could touch it.”
He frowned.
“But she didn’t think there was anything wrong with the cup floating.”
Zheng Yang listened without a change in tone.
“When common sense collapses, human cognition collapses with it.”
She pulled a folder from the rack on her right, flipped to a page, and pointed at a line.
Before Su Ding'an could see it clearly, she had already closed the folder and returned it to its place.
“When things float, their cognition automatically treats floating as normal.”
“It’s not that they didn’t notice.”
“It’s that they can’t notice.”
The pen in Su Ding'an’s hand stopped on the paper.
“So that isn’t a bug?”
“No.”
Zheng Yang said it plainly.
“It’s by design.”
She said it as smoothly as if she were explaining why the attendance system had a ten-minute grace period.
“Otherwise, every time common sense collapsed, we’d first have to deal with the panic of tens of thousands of people.”
Zheng Yang picked up the stapler on the desk and added another staple to the stack of forms.
“Think about it. If everyone on a street called the police at the same time saying their cups, motorcycles, and roadside signs were all flying, how would the police write up the report?”
Su Ding'an actually thought about it.
The complainant’s statement section probably wouldn’t be big enough.
And if the officer handling the case was also within the collapse zone, he would most likely be staring at a desk floating against the ceiling while asking the complainant not to make a false report.
That would certainly make closing the case difficult.
He wrote down six characters in his notebook: “Cognitive synchronization collapse.”
Afterward, he added a parenthesis.
Inside it, he wrote: “Protective mechanism, not a malfunction.”
The whole line looked a lot like a vocabulary definition on a test paper.
“After the collapse, will they remember?”
“They’ll remember what happened, but not the abnormality.”
Zheng Yang answered.
“The coffee will still be that cup of coffee, and the meeting will still be that meeting. They’ll just feel that there was a stretch in the middle that was so ordinary there was no reason to remember it.”
“What if something falls and hits someone?”
“The injury will remain.”
She paused.
“The reason will be filled in with something they can accept.”
“For example?”
“For example, the shelf wasn’t secured, the wind was too strong, or they lost their balance.”
Zheng Yang placed the stapled forms in the to-do rack.
“Human cognition is very good at filling in missing paperwork. Better than the Staffing Division.”
Su Ding'an lowered his head and wrote that down too.
Only after he finished did he realize it didn’t sound much like a formal regulation. He added two small words beside it: “verbal statement.”
He looked up.
“Then why can I see it?”
“Because you had already been assigned to the duty roster.”
Zheng Yang turned the monitor slightly.
A spreadsheet covered the screen, packed with cells stretching endlessly to the right.
One cell was highlighted in fluorescent yellow.
His name was in it.
Su Ding'an.
The adjacent column read “gravity,” and the time slot was 3:00 to 6:00 p.m.
The duty status column displayed “temporary replacement / completed.”
“The moment the text was sent, you were on shift.”
Zheng Yang clicked the cell with her mouse.
“Anyone on shift can see abnormalities. That comes with the job’s authority.”
Su Ding'an looked at the time.
“But when the text was sent, I was still at Hongchang Trading.”
“I know.”
“I hadn’t even answered the call.”
“The roster doesn’t care whether you answered.”
Zheng Yang said,
“It cares whether the notification was delivered.”
Su Ding'an slowly lowered his head and wrote a line in his notebook.
Notification delivered means the shift begins.
When he finished, he paused for two seconds, then looked up again.
“So I was technically working before I answered the call?”
“Yes.”
“Not from when I clocked in?”
“Not the authority.”
Zheng Yang’s answer was very precise.
Su Ding'an stopped the tip of his pen beneath the two words “the authority.”
He had been at Hongchang Trading for four years, long enough to develop a habit that was difficult to break.
Whenever someone deliberately split one concept into two terms, he immediately suspected that the other term might be calculated differently.
“The authority doesn’t begin with clocking in.”
He repeated it slowly.
“What about work hours?”
Zheng Yang didn’t answer.
Su Ding'an took out his phone and pulled up the text from the day before yesterday.
Text delivered at 2:20 p.m.
Clocked in at 3:00 p.m.
A full forty minutes in between.
He turned the screen toward her.
“Do those forty minutes between the text being sent and me clocking in count as work hours?”
For the first time, Zheng Yang hesitated.
Not because she didn’t know.
It was more like she knew the answer but hadn’t expected anyone to actually ask.
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether you want to claim them.”
She turned the screen back and resumed her original pace of speech.
“Most people don’t.”
Su Ding'an didn’t speak right away.
He lowered his head and calculated.
At the day’s hourly rate of NT$620, forty minutes came to roughly NT$413.
Plus another thirty-three cents. How the payroll system rounded it would depend on the system.
That was more than the price of a cup of coffee.
It was enough to buy him three days of lunch, as long as he skipped the braised egg.
He wrote down the entire sentence, “Most people don’t claim them,” and drew a line beneath it.
“Then how do I claim them?”
“Ask the rest of your questions first.”
Zheng Yang glanced at the clock on the wall.
The five minutes had long since passed.
It was now 8:56.
She didn’t rush him out.
Su Ding'an flipped back to the first two and a half pages and crossed out several questions.
He suddenly realized that the things he was asking about seemed different from what everyone else at this company talked about.
When Old Zhou had shown him around his assigned post, everyone had discussed the roster, the water temperature, and how many years it would take to retrieve a key thrown into the sea.
He, on the other hand, had kept asking when the authority took effect, how jurisdiction across districts was determined, and whether unclocked hours could be entered retroactively.
Thinking about it carefully, this was probably the occupational illness left over from four years of administrative work at Hongchang Trading.
When he saw an abnormality, he looked for the regulation first.
If he couldn’t find the regulation, he looked for a form.
Only when there was no form did he start to feel afraid.
“Is any of this written down?”
he asked.
Zheng Yang looked up.
This time, she hesitated even longer than before.
Long enough for Su Ding'an to wonder if he had touched on something he wasn’t allowed to ask about.
“There is.”
Her chair slid backward half a meter.
“But no one has ever asked me that.”
Zheng Yang stood and turned toward the row of short cabinets against the wall.
Su Ding'an followed her.
The top two shelves were arranged in perfect order, filled with recent forms and official documents. The folders were sorted by color into gray, yellow, and red.
The bottom compartment, however, looked as if it hadn’t been opened in years.
Even the pull ring was sticking.
Zheng Yang gripped the ring and pulled once. Nothing happened.
The second time, she used a little more force, and the drawer gave a dry rasp before slowly sliding open.
A small puff of dust floated up with it.
Su Ding'an glanced over instinctively.
The dust fell downward.
Good. Gravity was on shift today.
Several booklets of varying thicknesses lay inside the drawer.
The top one had a yellowed cover and curled corners. A layer of clear tape had been wrapped around its spine. When Zheng Yang pulled it out, her fingertip wiped a clean streak across the cover.
A line of text was printed on it:
“Operational Guidelines for Temporary Duty Substitution.”
A smaller line beneath it gave the year of revision.
Su Ding'an leaned closer. Half the digits had been worn away; he could only tell that the first one was a two.
“It’s all in here.”
Zheng Yang handed him the booklet and wiped her hand against the side of her pants.
Su Ding'an took it.
The booklet was heavier than he had expected.
The paper was the kind that absorbed ink. The printing was somewhat blurry, and turning the pages released the smell of paper that had once gotten damp and then dried in the sun.
The layout followed a traditional official-document format.
Every article and clause was clearly separated, and the bottom of each page contained a page number, revision notes, and the handling department.
He flipped forward to the table of contents.
The book was divided into six sections.
Substitute Qualifications, Staffing Procedures, Scope of Authority, Work Hours and Compensation, Incident Reporting, Dispute Resolution.
The final section included a list of appendix forms, seventeen in all.
When Su Ding'an saw “seventeen,” he actually felt a little more grounded.
As long as something could be turned into a form, there was usually still a way to deal with it.
“Why isn’t this in Common Sense Connect?”
he asked.
“The system doesn’t have an attachment field.”
Zheng Yang answered.
“Can’t they add one?”
“The request has been in for eight years.”
“And it still hasn’t been done?”
“It’s in the queue.”
Su Ding'an nodded.
The answer was so familiar that he almost forgot he was inside a company responsible for maintaining the world’s common sense.
Hongchang Trading’s leave system had also received seven change requests. In the end, the only successful modification had been changing the button from blue to dark blue.
He flipped to the middle section.
The heading at the top of the page read: “Scope and Restrictions of Temporary Authority.”
The first clause concerned jurisdiction.
The wording was extremely detailed.
Each position’s authority extended only within its approved jurisdiction.
Jurisdiction was determined by address number, floor, or marked boundaries.
When a substitute left the jurisdiction, the authority automatically became invalid.
A further explanation explicitly stated that a substitute could not claim authority outside the jurisdiction for any reason.
Su Ding'an’s hand stopped when he copied the words “address number.”
“Down to the address number?”
“Down to the address number.”
Zheng Yang leaned against the cabinet with her arms folded.
“Last time, a substitute chased something across the street.”
“What?”
“A shadow.”
Su Ding'an looked up.
Zheng Yang had no intention of explaining why a shadow had crossed the street. She simply continued.
“The moment he crossed the boundary, his authority disappeared. He stood there in the middle of the crosswalk, staring blankly, and almost got hit by a bus.”
“What happened afterward?”
“The bus stopped.”
“What about the shadow?”
“It wasn’t in his jurisdiction anymore.”
Su Ding'an understood.
The company’s principle for closing cases was extremely clear.
Once you stepped outside your authority, it stopped being your problem.
He copied the case beside the clause and added a question mark after “shadow.”
“What if there’s a building in the middle of a jurisdiction that happens to sit right on the boundary?”
he pressed.
When handling vendor contracts at Hongchang Trading, mismatched addresses were what he feared most.
Some of Taipei’s older buildings had one address on the first floor, while the second floor, accessed through a side entrance, had another. They shared the same staircase, yet on paper looked like two separate buildings.
“Address determines it.”
Zheng Yang flipped another page and pointed to a passage.
“If the same building has two addresses, it counts as two jurisdictions.”
“What if the same person goes upstairs and downstairs?”
“The authority turns on and off.”
She thought about it.
“Once, a substitute went up and down the stairs in the same building. His authority turned on three times and off three times. In the end, he had to fill out three forms because the system determined that he had entered and exited three times.”
“Can’t they combine them?”
“They can apply.”
“Which form?”
Zheng Yang flipped to the appendix and tapped a line with her finger.
“Application to Consolidate Continuous Cross-Jurisdiction Operations, Appendix Form 6.”
Su Ding'an copied the name, then added another line beside it.
Crossing addresses requires another form; consolidation must be requested.
When he finished and looked up, he found Zheng Yang staring at that line.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She said,
“It’s just the first time anyone’s copied down the appendix number too.”
Su Ding'an didn’t see anything strange about it.
How else would he find the form next time without the number?
He lowered his head to read the clause again, then suddenly remembered standing in the gravity duty room for three hours without daring to drink more than a sip of water.
“What about the bathroom?”
“What?”
“The bathroom outside the gravity duty room.”
Su Ding'an asked with complete seriousness.
“I didn’t dare go out that day. I was afraid that the moment I crossed the door, everything on the entire street would start flying again.”
Zheng Yang looked at him for two seconds.
“You can go.”
“But the clause says that leaving the jurisdiction automatically invalidates the authority.”
“That bathroom and the duty room use the same address, and the marked area includes it too.”
Zheng Yang flipped the booklet forward and found a tiny floor plan.
She pointed to a hatched area in the corner.
“Here.”
Su Ding'an stared at the hatched area.
That day, he had been less than eight meters from a bathroom within his jurisdiction and had still endured three full hours.
He said nothing.
He simply wrote in his notebook: Bathroom included in jurisdiction.
Afterward, he drew two heavy lines underneath it.
The second clause concerned responsibilities.
It was shorter than the jurisdiction section, and more rigid.
A substitute could perform only the tasks listed on the duty chart and could not perform any task not listed on it.
There was no exception.
Nor was there any supplement saying, “May be handled flexibly with a supervisor’s approval.”
Su Ding'an flipped to the appendix and found the page for gravity duty officers.
The responsibility field contained only one sentence:
“Maintain the constancy of downward movement for objects within the jurisdiction.”
He read it twice.
“So a gravity duty officer can only make things fall downward?”
“Yes.”
“Can’t they make things fly?”
“No.”
Su Ding'an found it a little funny.
A gravity duty officer being unable to make things fly sounded like an accountant being unable to arbitrarily increase the money in the company account.
The rule was reasonable.
It was the fact that it needed to be written down that was unreasonable.
“Then whose responsibility is it to make things fly?”
Zheng Yang took the booklet and flipped several pages forward.
She stopped at another duty chart, sliding her finger down the columns until it halted at a line in the middle.
That line had been crossed out with a black bar.
A tiny red stamp had been placed beside it.
The characters on the stamp had faded, but “abolished” could still just barely be made out.
“That position was abolished in 1974.”
She handed the booklet back.
Su Ding'an lowered his head to look at the crossed-out line.
Only a few strokes of the position name remained, perhaps “buoyancy” or “rising.” He couldn’t be sure.
The remarks column on the right, however, clearly contained two words:
“For reasons.”
“What reason?”
“Don’t know.”
Zheng Yang said it crisply, without the slightest hesitation.
“I’ve only read the first two chapters of this myself. I haven’t finished the appendices.”
“What about the abolition record?”
“Not in the Staffing Division.”
“Where is it?”
“Head office.”
Su Ding'an copied “For reasons” into his notebook and drew a huge question mark beside it.
Then he added another line.
Abolition record is at head office.
As he wrote, a very administrative thought occurred to him.
A position capable of making objects fly had been abolished, yet the reason field had simply been filled in with “For reasons.”
If a document like that had been submitted at Hongchang Trading, Accounting would have rejected it at least three times. The second time, they would have circled it in red and asked, “What reason?”
He couldn’t help glancing at the black bar again.
“After the position was abolished, who did the original work?”
“No one.”
“Then why do things still fly?”
Zheng Yang’s shoulder shifted slightly against the cabinet.
“Abolishing a position doesn’t mean the thing itself stops existing.”
She said,
“It just means no one is responsible for it.”
Su Ding'an’s pen stopped.
He knew that line very well too.
Last year, Hongchang Trading had eliminated a General Affairs assistant. The work hadn’t disappeared. It had simply been divided among the three people left behind, until it became a matter of whoever had time doing it.
Apparently, the world’s common sense used the same approach to streamlining manpower.
The third clause concerned work hours.
It stated that temporary staff could work a maximum of 174 hours covering shifts per month.
Any excess had to be separately authorized and applied for in advance.
Another subsection specified that after the end of a shift, a substitute possessed no authority associated with any position.
Su Ding'an took out his phone and calculated.
174 hours per month.
If calculated over thirty days, that averaged 5.8 hours a day.
If only the twenty-two working days were counted, it came to nearly 7.9 hours a day.
That was no longer the occasional cover shift.
It was enough for another full-time job.
But he still had to handle his regular full-time job at Hongchang Trading during the day. Once the hours from both sides overlapped, nothing would fit unless he carved the time out of sleep.
He copied down the numbers and wrote a line beside them.
Regular job and substitute hours conflict; confirmation needed.
“Is 174 a hard limit?”
“It’s hard.”
After answering, Zheng Yang added half a sentence.
“But you can apply in advance.”
“Not afterward?”
“Afterward, it’s overtime.”
“What happens if you go over?”
“There’s a penalty.”
“Who gets penalized?”
“The substitute.”
Su Ding'an slowly raised his head.
“Isn’t the roster made by the Staffing Division?”
“Yes.”
“Then why does the substitute get penalized?”
“Because substitutes are obligated to confirm their accumulated hours.”
Zheng Yang’s tone remained perfectly calm.
“The system sends reminders.”
“How far in advance?”
“The day before the overtime.”
Su Ding'an looked at her.
For a document that had to be applied for in advance and go through an approval process, a reminder one day beforehand was basically the same as being notified after the fact.
He could more or less imagine who would sign, who would stamp, and who would bear the responsibility in the end.
After four years in administration, he had seen this structure too many times.
The system was responsible for sending notifications.
The supervisor was responsible for approval.
The Staffing Division was responsible for scheduling.
In the end, the substitute was responsible for being penalized.
The division of labor was extremely complete.
He copied down the entire sentence, “The substitute gets penalized,” and circled it.
Then he flipped back to the work-hours clause and read it again.
“Any excess must be separately authorized and applied for in advance.”
The word “must” was meaningful.
It was different from “may.”
“May” meant it was allowed.
“Must” meant it was required.
He wrote the two words side by side in the margin of his notebook and drew a line between them.
Zheng Yang watched him copy everything down.
She didn’t hurry him or return to her desk. She simply leaned against the cabinet and watched him write each item one by one.
When Su Ding'an finished copying the third clause and looked up, she finally spoke.
“You’re really copying it all down.”
“What else would I do?”
“Most people leave after listening.”
She thought for a moment.
“The last temporary worker I trained lasted eleven days.”
“Why did he quit?”
“He didn’t quit.”
Zheng Yang said,
“He didn’t show up on the twelfth day and didn’t answer his phone. The system later automatically classified him as having been absent without leave for consecutive days and revoked his access.”
Su Ding'an’s hand stopped around his pen.
“What happened to him?”
“Don’t know.”
Zheng Yang’s tone remained unchanged.
“The only question he ever asked was when the salary would be deposited.”
“That’s a practical question too.”
Su Ding'an was being honest.
On his first day, standing on Basement 2 and seeing the transfer text, the first thing he had calculated was his hourly wage.
“It is practical.”
Zheng Yang didn’t argue.
“But the deposit date was written on page seven of the contract. He didn’t read that far.”
Su Ding'an capped his pen and flipped through the pages he had just filled.
He suddenly felt that none of these rules were actually bad.
Jurisdiction, responsibilities, work hours.
Every one of them was written clearly.
There was an application process for anything that needed to be requested.
There were authorization rules for anything that needed to be authorized.
Even crossing addresses had Appendix Form 6 for requesting consolidation.
The real problem with this document wasn’t what it said.
It was the fact that it was lying at the bottom of the cabinet.
And the pull ring was still sticking.
He picked up the booklet and flipped to the revision history.
The last revision had been eleven years ago.
The reason for revision read: “Adjustment to accommodate operational realities.”
The revision before that had been twenty-three years ago.
In other words, the entire booklet had been changed only once in twenty-three years.
What exactly had been adjusted that time wasn’t recorded in the remarks.
“How many copies of this are there?”
Su Ding'an asked.
“Just this one.”
After saying it, Zheng Yang paused too.
It was as if only after speaking the words aloud did she realize that the number seemed wrong.
“There should be another copy in the Audit Division.”
“Should be?”
“The last time I saw it was three years ago.”
“Is there an electronic copy?”
“Half-scanned.”
“How long has it been scanned?”
“Don’t know.”
Zheng Yang thought about it.
“It was already being scanned when I joined the company.”
Su Ding'an didn’t write that down.
He simply remembered it.
There were 2,417 positions in the entire company.
There were only two copies of the duty-substitution rules.
One might be in the Audit Division.
The other was lying at the bottom of a cabinet in the Staffing Division, its pull ring stuck and its cover layered with dust.
The electronic copy had been “half-scanned” for an unknown number of years.
This was no longer a document-management problem.
It was a selection process.
Only people capable of finding the rules for themselves deserved to know that the rules existed.
Su Ding'an flipped to the last few pages of the booklet.
The second-to-last page was the supplementary provisions.
The print was smaller than in the preceding clauses, as if the person laying out the document had suddenly realized there wasn’t enough room and reduced the font size by one point.
He brought the booklet closer and read downward line by line.
When he reached one line, he stopped.
“Substitute compensation is calculated according to actual hours on duty; excess hours are paid separately.”
He read it once.
Then again.
After that, he flipped back to the earlier work-hours clause to confirm that the two sections didn’t contradict each other.
“Excess hours are paid separately” was written in the supplementary provisions.
The work-hour limit and advance-application requirement were written under restrictions on authority.
More than thirty pages separated the two clauses.
You had to read both to know they were actually a set.
Su Ding'an raised his head.
“So overtime really is paid separately?”
Zheng Yang nodded.
“Yes.”
She pushed the bottom drawer of the cabinet closed.
It stuck halfway.
Zheng Yang shoved it with her knee before it finally shut all the way.
“This is the only clause in the entire company that no one has ever complained about.”
Su Ding'an lowered his head to look at the line.
He thought for two seconds.
“Because no one saw it?”
“Because people who got paid didn’t complain.”
Zheng Yang turned and walked back to her desk.
“People who didn’t get paid usually didn’t know they could complain.”
Su Ding'an followed her back with the booklet in his arms.
The clock on the wall had already reached 9:23.
The original five minutes had now stretched to thirty-six.
Zheng Yang sat down and pulled the stack of pending forms back in front of her.
Su Ding'an didn’t leave.
“What else?”
she asked.
He flipped his notebook back to the page where he had drawn two heavy lines.
“Forty minutes.”
Zheng Yang looked at him.
“You said I had to decide whether I wanted to claim them.”
Su Ding'an arranged the text-delivery time, call history, and clock-in time from his phone across the desk in order.
“I want to claim them.”
The Staffing Division fell silent for two seconds.
The person measuring the form-column width on the left lifted their head, then quickly lowered it again, as if afraid of getting dragged into this.
Zheng Yang leaned back in her chair.
“Are you sure?”
“The rule says so.”
“No one has ever applied before.”
“That was before.”
“The system might reject it.”
“What would the rejection reason be?”
Zheng Yang didn’t answer.
Because until it was submitted, there could be no rejection reason.
Su Ding'an had dealt with too many similar situations at Hongchang Trading.
“It might be rejected” usually wasn’t a rule.
It was simply the most convenient sentence when everyone was too lazy to submit the paperwork.
Zheng Yang looked at him for several seconds, then finally opened the second drawer on the left.
She pulled a pale green form from a stack of papers in different colors and placed it in front of him.
Printed at the top was: “Application to Retroactively Enter Unclocked Hours on Duty.”
The upper-right corner was marked Appendix Form 11.
When Su Ding'an saw the number, he immediately felt a little better.
Of course there was a form.
“Fill it out.”
Zheng Yang switched the red ballpoint pen for a blue one and handed it to him.
“Hours requested?”
“Forty minutes.”
“Reason?”
Su Ding'an looked at her.
“Write the truth.”
He lowered his head and filled in each field one by one.
Name.
Assigned position.
Notification delivery time.
Official clock-in time.
Hours requested for retroactive entry.
The final field was the reason.
Su Ding'an thought for several seconds, then wrote in the box: “After receiving the temporary assignment notification, the duty roster authority had already taken effect. I proceeded to the approved location before the time specified in the notification and completed the handover.”
After finishing, he checked the date one more time.
Only after confirming that he hadn’t entered it incorrectly did he sign the applicant field.
Zheng Yang took the form and read it from beginning to end.
“You even wrote the reason in complete detail.”
“The field is that big.”
Su Ding'an said.
“Writing only ‘temporary substitute shift’ would make it look unfinished.”
Zheng Yang didn’t argue.
She picked up the red stamp from the corner of the desk and pressed it twice into the ink pad.
When the stamp hovered above the form, she asked once more,
“You really want to submit it?”
“I do.”
“It’s only forty minutes.”
“Forty minutes is still work.”
Su Ding'an paused.
“And at that day’s hourly rate, it’s more than four hundred dollars.”
That was the most practical reason of all.
Zheng Yang glanced at him.
Then she brought the stamp down.
Clack.
The receipt date landed clearly in the lower-right corner.
She tore off the first copy and placed it in the to-do rack, then handed the second copy back to him.
“Seven business days.”
“What if it’s rejected?”
“The appeal process is on the back of the form.”
Su Ding'an immediately flipped it over.
There really was one.
He tucked the second copy into his notebook behind the two and a half pages of questions, aligning the edges perfectly.
Then he glanced at the booklet on the desk.
“Can I borrow this?”
Zheng Yang fell silent.
For the third time that day.
This time, it lasted longer than the first two.
“No.”
She said it plainly.
Su Ding'an nodded.
There was only one copy of an important document. It made sense that he couldn’t take it away.
“Then can I make copies?”
Zheng Yang fell silent again.
She turned to look at the copier in the corner.
A sheet of paper was taped to it:
“When paper jams, do not disassemble the machine yourself. Please contact the Paper Passes Smoothly Position, extension 119.”
Su Ding'an followed her gaze.
After several seconds, Zheng Yang pushed the booklet a little closer to him.
“Put it back when you’re done.”
“Okay.”
Su Ding'an picked up the booklet and headed toward the copier.
Halfway there, he turned back.
“Does copying time count as work hours?”
Zheng Yang closed her eyes.
For only one second.
When she opened them again, she pointed toward the door.
“You’re not on shift today.”
“I know.”
Su Ding'an said,
“That’s why I’m asking first.”