I was good at studying at the university which contrasted sharply with my study in high school. I ever was the first place in Western-Economic examination among over 200 students and I was the only favorable boy in the heart of my English teacher. I had obtained the 3rd level scholarship twice and the 2nd level scholarship once. I was also one of few students who had passed all the credit hours one time only without restudying class. I was only one to get the 98 points in my physical training class. Whereas and unfortunately, I was one of few students who had no girlfriends all the times. I don’t know why, I just felt I was dull at feeling or love, was it possible related with my fucking runtishness? I kept being virgin till graduation.
Recalling my past days in the university, I didn’t think I really had learned what I was interested at, but I really had learned well how to study efficiently and effectively by myself, especially I did English well. Perhaps this was my biggest harvest in these years because it helped me a lot in the following years. My major was foreign trade, it was my father’s intention not mine. I want to be an engineer, computer engineer, but at that time, I actually had no ideas about what the harddisk is! The only software program I was able to use was “Office Word 95″. A rookie wanted to be a great computer engineer didn’t know anything about computer. How absurd! But, “you never know what you can do till you try”. I just thought so.
After graduation, I wanted to prove the above mentioned wisdom, I went to Shanghai when 22. I participated in a small computer software company which was owned by one of my father’s friend. I left from the university and entered into another university - “social university”. The boss was very rigorous and stingy, he gave me 300 RMB as a monthly salary for 6-months test duration because I was nothing just like a shit, at most an apprentice. I worked hard day and night, self-learned the C and C++ language which were the basic computer coding languages. I read the language reference books which were fully writen in English. My job was to code some C language programs running on the DOS system (it was an old OS before Windows System, you might head of it if you were born early enough). The program had a very professional term called “POS” system, which meant “Point of Sells”, being utilized in every cash register of big stores, supermarkets or malls. My responsibility is to code, develop and maintain this system. It was a very strict and difficult job. My program must run under a kind of specific IBM and Simens computer machine which only had 1M physical memory and 280M harddisk capacity and whose keyboard was not standard 102 keys, even more, I must imitate the graphic interface of Windows 32 system under the text-command based DOS system. I must allocate the memory manually to my program, now, you don’t have to care shit about memory because that Windows system will do it for you automatically. I believe you begin to understand how awful my situation was and how hard job I had to face. I did this job with only 300 RMB pay for the whole goddamn 6 months. But they say, a genuine coding engineer is a C language engineer. Every coin has two sides, this job made me become the genuine computer engineer.
You even can’t imagine how uptight and rough living I made in Shanghai. No entertainment, no close friends, no sexual life, the most horrible is I have no enough money. I couldn’t endure this living, so shortly, I was back to Hangzhou with several-months exploitation of that boss in end of 1999.
1999 was a very important year to China since the internet began to develop rapidly and steadily. 1999 was also a very lucky year for me. One reason is, with the growth of internet, I found a new job immediately, which is an ISP company engaged with internet basic service and content service. Another reason is, I met my girlfriend, my first girlfriend.
(To be continued…)
