Karl In A Battle

I never contacted her any more since then, she left Hangzhou. I just felt everything had come and gone so quickly. I always believed I had a strong willpower but this time I was beaten by love thoroughly. In order to avoid the disturbance of failing love, I worked hard and tried to concentrate myself into busy life. It took me a long time to recover from sadness of breakup.

Indeed, Time heals all wounds. Life revived me again and made me screw up. I thought I had accumulated the enough experience of the internet technology, I decided to jump to another better company which could give me more room to develop myself and better salary and welfare.

I went to many cities, Beijing, Shanghai, and applied to many internet companies, sina.com, 8848.net,  elong.com, meetchina.com. I was refused by all those companies with uncertain reasons. That’s acceptable, after all, I was not the Bill Gates or Linus Torvalds.

Finally, fortunately, maybe inevitably, I decided to send a resume to Alibaba.com which was not as popular and familiar as the companies mentioned above in 2001.  As Napoleon said, “Success is due to diligence and opportunity”. When I received the call from HR of Alibaba.com to arrange an interview for me, I knew I must grasp this opportunity.

In that interview day, I had to confess I got little nervous when I stepped into this great company, just like a chuff went to the modern metropolis. A nearly-bald man met me at a small room, he gave me an examination paper and asked me to finish it in 30 minutes, then walked out. I was locked in the damn triangular room and contemplated these damn questions which were all about algorithm, matrix, data structure, computer language grammer rules, etc. I was totally fucked up with these questions, my major in university was foreign trade, I hadn’t learned any subjects of computer science like data structure, algorithm. It was really a mess on my answer paper, which could let everybody down. After about 20 mins, while I was wiping my sweat on my forehead, that guy was returning back. He asked me if I had done it, then he checked my answer and found some unfinished questions, he said, “That’s ok, doesn’t matter, let us begin the interview”. He asked me some technonical questions most of  those was about Java and internet. I didn’t know my answer whether satified him or not. I just couldn’t figure it out totally. When I got through with it, a woman from HR Dept continued to ask me other questions about my personality, working experience and personal value. When all of these was over, I was asked for going back to home and waiting the interview result.

I walked out of the main gate of the company slowly with depressed heart, I was beginning to realize I probably lose the opportunity once more. I waited for the elevator’s coming and thought, should I wait the miracle happening or seek for another job? Suddenly, the door of elevator opened, a scrubby and thin man walked out, that is it, he was Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba.com, my favorite enterpriser at that time. He smiled to me and gave me a firm and confident look. What a luck! I met the big man!

I didn’t know if this encounter was destined, but when I just walked out of the elevator, my cellphone rang, I knew the miracle was coming, HR informed me that I passed the interview and requested me to prepare the physical examination.

Just like that, I successfully joined in the Alibaba.com with a little bit luck and destiny.

(To be continued…)

Everything became so genial when I came back to Hangzhou, maybe I missed home too much.

When I recalled that I found a new, i.e., the second job, I was beginning to realize that moment probably was my milestone of my life. As a computer engineer, I jumped from DOS directly to Internet skipping experiencing the windows development. I started to learn new computer languages, ASP, PHP, ISAPI to develop the internet applications. My first project of the second job was to develop a MIS (Management Information System) for a drugstore, including repertory management, sales management, report management. This project was based on Internet brower and ActiveX plugin coded by Delphi. Maybe this was the most terrible project I did, tons of bugs and was extremely unstable even occur to IE crash.  What a mess! I promised I would never use Delphi to code any more!

However, In this failing project, one thing was successful, I fell into the love with a girl who was a clerk of that drugstore. She was pretty, innocent with white skin and good figure. I noticed her when I saw her at the first time. I didn’t know what the feeling was, people called love. This was my first love, which made me so nervous that I didn’t know where I should start and how to express myself frankly. They said the first love was the most beautiful and romantic in the whole life. I agreed with it.

I remembered clearly our first date. That night we went to a movie, she walking slowly ahead of me with little shyness and uncomfortable behavior, I followed her with the same status. We didn’t talk each other, I just felt tremendously awkward at that time. Suddenly, I grabbed her hand unexpectedly from behind, she didn’t look at me, I can feel she was so trembling at the moment but later I never let her hand escape from mine. Hahaha, I was so foxy. From that night, we were just like peas and carrots, always together. We were lovers! We encouraged each other, cared each other and loved each other. Though we didn’t probably know what the love is indeed, we had a very very very happy time together in our youth.

Being with her, I experienced the first kiss, the first canoodle and the first sex, so did she. I don’t want to narrate more about these scenarios, but when these first things came, I had totally no idea about what I am doing, maybe the sexual actuation stopped my brain running. By the way, I was not the animal to philander some girls and made them unvirgin, I still think  so far that it is no necessary to keep virgin until marriage, because the peak of man’s sexuality is at 18, and will be decreasing  year by year after 30, so between 18 and 30, a man should grasp the appropriate chance to take some legal and secure sexual activity. For what? for the better health. I read it from a medical magzine. I had’t researched the same things on woman, mostly alike I think.

Whereas, one year later, in 2000, neither my girlfriend’s mother did think I had the enough economic power to plan on her daughter’s future,  nor my father did think she had a good education and cultural backgroud to make me worth staying with her, we broke up reluctantly because we didn’t want to be against each family. That was my first love ended quickly and tragically.

(To be continued…)

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…)