From March till May, were the toughest two months that YL employees’ had endured in their lives.
Many years later, when YL entered the international stage, the reporters interviewed one of YL’s elite female white-collar employees. They asked her what was the toughest incident she had experienced in the past ten odd years that she was with YL. That employee who was publicly known to be careful and stern, yet very goddess-like in every aspect, answered,
After I survived those nightmarish two months, the word ‘tough’ and any of its synonyms have never appeared in my dictionary ever again.
Yet when the reporters asked about the specifics, that elite lady went silent for a long moment, before giving an ambiguous answer:
…… The day after day of tedious work was seriously the most boring thing ever. Moreover, it was against the real intention of why YL hired us in the first place. I considered resigning many times In fact, many of our colleagues did too. but, in the end, we all stayed behind for the sake of the high salary. Although we stayed behind, the process changed our job scope. Thankfully, we managed to change it back in the end.
……
On March 5th, YL’s chairman Yan Jin was involved in a large-scale car accident and was sent to the hospital blood covered and in comatose state.
It was only March 6th that the rest of YL’s employees got hold of this information when they arrived for work.
Let’s stress again that YL was a particularly unique company. First, there were the friends that Yan Jin knew since childhood and those confidants he had made overseas. Shao Yue was one of them, and even though he tended of go off-track quite easily, he was useful nevertheless. Chu Ge was the one who could be of use when major things happened.Some of them did not show their faces on the surface and only held an empty title in the company but were more useful than anyone else – for example, Liu Ye.
As for the other employees, about half of them joined YL because of the flexible atmosphere that was suitable for younger employees. Yan Jin was used to how foreign companies functioned and he also did not put in much effort in YL in the first place, so it indirectly formed YL’s free and democratic system. Even the twelve restaurants in the employee staff canteen had been voted on by the employees. Till date, the company rules were almost flexible according to the employees’ requests – for example, the Pets’ Day that the outsiders had discussed so enthusiastically.
A relaxed environment, harmonious atmosphere and high-quality staff canteen, all these micro-managing decisions that other companies did not bother with had successfully compensated YL’s salary difference and lack of employee lodging, attracting a lot of local people from S City to join them.
The other half had joined purely because of Yan Jin.
Yes, for the sake of Yan Jin, almost half of them.
It seemed like something extremely illogical but there were reasons behind it.
Speaking of which, one would need to look back on what kind of person Yan Jin was again.
……
This man called Yan Jin, at age twenty-four, returned from abroad, took over YL, and appeared in the eyes of the public. On the second year after he returned, he became S City’s youth entrepreneur and the best businessman of the year. Those titles would always be awarded every year without fail. They did not have any real meaning and did not bring any real benefits to the Yan family or to YL. The only use of the awards was that they published Yan Jin’s picture in the finance newspaper which didn’t really mean much.
S City was a highly developed city with very few young adults who had the habit of reading newspapers. It was a medium for advertisement and publicity that did not have much meaning. It was just like those entrepreneurs that appeared on the headlines in the past – they would probably be jealous of them and then quickly forget about them again.
However, that was the point. Those people who were forgotten were basically all greasy middle-aged men in their forties who due to overwork ended up with problems like baldness and beer-belly.
In such an environment, Yan Jin’s appearance was eye-catching like a lotus that appeared in the swamp. Don’t misunderstand, the others were not worthless mud compared to him. After all, they were successful entrepreneurs.
Perhaps they were more like the river in the background?
If they were not hearing it from a person who subscribed to those financial newspapers, they would never think that this was that boring financial newspaper and would surely wrongly assume that it was a fashion newspaper.
The aloof-looking young man was being interviewed with his body slightly tilted away. His slightly relaxed sitting posture did not hide that perfectly-sculpted body. Those rolled up sleeves revealed a pale looking forearm, while his manly hands were more than enough to make people with a hand fetish scream. However, what made them unable to shift their gaze away was the fact that the perfect hand propped up an extremely handsome face – a face that did not lose to an actor.
S City’s entertainment industry was well-developed. Young and good-looking entertainers were like factory production, that is to say not lacking at all. There were so many that it numbed the citizen’s judgement of beauty.
Hence, on that day when a young lady who was sick and tired of those plastic-surgery faces in the entertainment industry happened to see that picture that was lying on her dad’s desk…
At that moment, it was as if she saw how Mars had hit the Earth and awakened all of the volcanoes that had been asleep. A storm like one from the Ice Age instantly blanketed her mind.
The world that had come to an end now bloomed once again.
The issue that Yan Jin was in ended up as the best-selling issue ever. Every publisher’s website was flooded with hits, the fashion industry’s newspaper was completely drowned overnight. Endless phone calls came in to Spreading Fire
’s
magazine publisher and requested them to interview YL’s current chairman at all cost and publish it into a special column. There were even rich citizens who were willing to buy an entire column and use it to interview Yan Jin.
As she listened to the young girls screaming their hearts out on the other end of the phone, Spreading Fire
’s chief editor immediately realized that a legend was about to be born. She immediately instructed her confidants to put down all their tasks at hand and head straight to YL’s headquarters to get a interview right and publish rights to YL cooperation.
Even Yan Jin himself had not expected such a commotion to happen. If he had known, he would never have agreed to let his picture get published.
He was an extremely handsome, young entrepreneur, aged 24, coming from a wealthy family, and full of talents. In addition, the picture had unconsciously created an aloof image that was eventually confirmed in the follow-up interview.
Overnight, all men and women from eighteen to thirty-eight years old fell in love.
As compared to young, harmless and innocent puppies who made up the entertainment industry, how could they resist the tyrannical chairman?
The oppressive chairman trope instantly spread throughout every social media.
Initially, as a company that had finally made their public appearance, YL was considered to be a half-entrepreneurship initiative that regardless of reputation and salary could not be compared to other companies aside from SI, who was capable of easily destroying any companies who would outshine them.
In fact, YL had not moved to S city back then and was situated in a very isolated location. It was very inconvenient to travel to work and without company lodging,many people were unwilling to join YL. Those who joined were people who had been rejected from better companies or university students who had just graduated and came to YL to gain experience and add it to their resumes.
However, when Yan Jin’s photograph became widely spread due to social media, the number of people who interviewed for YL increased by a tenfold.
Tenfold.
There was once where a reporter interviewed a young lady who drove a Porsche everyday, lives in H City and had three private properties under her name. They ask her why would she drive a hundred over kilometers to YL everyday to work. Because the toll fee she would need to pay everyday was more than her basic salary in YL. Plus the cost of petrol, even her bonus would be used up for her daily travelling. Such a job seemed too illogical for a person with her education qualification, which could easily get her a much closer company.
That young lady rolled her eyes at the reporter and was dismissive towards such a stupid question:
Oh please, is there a need to be logical to be a fan?
The same sentence reflected the heartfelt words for many of YL employees.
To those young adults who need not worry about quality of life, yet feeling emotionally empty. they were desperate for an idol who would satisfy their psychological aspect. And Yan Jin happened to appear at the right time and the right place.
One of the twenty-five years old female employee, who gave up her life of waking up naturally every morning and to count her cash on till her fingers cramp, described the change she experienced after one month of employment at YL: She could look at her chairman’s photograph everyday and still eat her plain white rice happily, which in turn made her lose ten kilograms in a month and she don’t even need an alarm to wake her up every morning because she would wake up smiling from her dreams.
This does not include some ambitious people whose main goal was to marry into the Yan family. However, most of the employees who was interviewed all commented that it does not matter if Yan Jin would get married or not. So long as Yan Jin remain in YL, they would never leave YL.
There was even a few representative characters among them, who they had placed their hopes on. One of them was Secretary Fang who gathered every scandals and rumors of Yan Jin and disseminate these information to a chat group that only consist of fangirls and fanboys.
As for how scary this chat group was, let’s put it this way, without Yan Jin’s knowledge, he
had
already dated two girlfriends and one boyfriend.
……
Of course, half of these employees who came for Yan Jin were mostly young ladies. There were young men who just graduated from universities as well, just lesser in numbers. These people basically treat Yan Jin as an idol they loved and (probably) did not have any special feelings for him.
Some of them came from families that they did not need to fret about getting a job or living poorly for their entire lives. But for the sake of beating all odds and join YL just to see their idol, they reported to work diligently everyday and even requested to work overtime. Because when an employee work more than a certain amount of hours in a month, they would personally receive a fruit basket from Yan Jin as a reward.
Back to the current topic – how tragic was YL in that two months.
It was not the first time that Yan Jin took leave from work. Just last year, he cleared all his leave that was accumulated for the past ten years and even threw YL into an extremely chaotic situation at one point.
However, March 6th was the darkest day that all YL employees would never forget.
Due to health reasons, YL’s chairman officially announced that he will be resigning from his position. There was no specific date of him resuming his post and in the meanwhile, Shao Yue would take full charge as a replacement chairman.
When some of these fan-employees whose daily motivation to work was to enjoy their chairman’s presence, heard about this announcement, they even imagined that Yan Jin was in coma just like how those novels described – they fainted.
In a single day, the ambulance came three times.
