SHE——Move Me A Lot!
Author: Guo Jihong, from Kunming CIBA Mining Machinery Co. Ltd, Schedule Settlement Department
It was the second week after I entered Kunming CIBA Mining Machinery Factory when I met her for the first time. As a clerk in Personnel Department, it was part of my duty to send all kinds of documents. The first time when I stepped into the Production Section, all staff was busy with their work, showing no response to my appearance. I greeted a woman staff and handed over the document to her for signing. She, with a serious expression, signed it and continued to work without a word. Just at that time, I knew her name, a very masculine name.
The second time when I met her was to ask some workers to move tables and chairs for a meeting. Stepping into Production Section again, they were busier than the last time, the phone ringing and received alternately, so I had to stand aside to wait. Seeing there was a chance to speak, I came to her at once and told her my purpose, but she replied with no expression, “Wait for a moment; we are busy now.” I tried to emphasize the urgency of the time, but she had turned back to answer the phone……
20 minutes before the meeting, she had arranged some workers to move the tables and chairs already. From then on, I showed respects to her with a little fear, after all, she wore a serious expression. I reminded myself to go to Production Section as little as possible.
With more contacts with her in the following days, I had less fear of her, but I still feel that the leader in Production Section was too serious to get along with. At the end of October in 2005, I was transferred to work in Production Section, which was really a great challenge to me. I majored in Arts Management, never set foot in machinery field and knew nothing about it. She and some other colleagues were kind enough to teach me with patience whenever I had a question. I was a pure layman for the machinery; difference in professions makes one feel worlds apart, so it cost strenuous efforts for me to master it. I started to doubt about my competence, sleepless every night. I determined in mind, if I made no improvement in 3 months, I would quit the job.
Each day, every colleague was deadly busy, but I could only do some clerical work, offering no help in course of production, which made me extremely gloomy. I told her all my feelings, and then she encouraged me not to be pessimistic for that she also grew from a layman. She said that, when our company transformed from construction industry to machinery process, she knew nothing about how to read drawings. Her encourage gave me some confidence of persistence.
She asked me to collect and classify drawings on the basis of product type, arrange them by drawing no. and then send them to the workshop according to the requirement of production plan. At that time, I felt headache on dozens of oil-hit drawings. Without any machinery manufacturing knowledge in mind, I had no concrete idea of the components and parts. Then she taught me with great patience, how to read detail drawings and parts drawings from general drawings. After that, she took me to plant to see the definite objects. She taught me to make production plan after I mastered the basic knowledge of drawing reading and was able to figure out the general drawings from parts drawings and the relation between them. I felt myself a little stupid and slow, always afraid of making a mistake. When finishing the scheme of a small component, I would examine it repeatedly before handing over to her for verification, for which she never criticized me. Whenever I met with a difficulty in work and turned to her for help, she would spare no pains to explain it with a smile, even if she was on busiest work.
She often said that, “You have higher lever of learning, thus as long as you study diligently, you can handle anything difficult.” Her statement made me happy and sad: sadness came from the suspicion whether I could master what she had taught me in expected time and whether she would be disappointed greatly; happiness lay in her trust to me. At that moment, I was determined to study with no turning back, no matter how difficult and toilsome it was, and do every work she confessed well. Perhaps I might make lots of excuses for my stupid, but I could not disappoint her.
From then on, I started to know her in deed.
In the eyes of colleagues, she is a veritable workaholic. In order to improve production scheduling work, she often runs in two workshops. I still remember her 3 pairs of shoes, wore-out by raw iron filings residues, ugly. Seeing her tired appearance, I really could not figure out what makes her so persistent and what makes her work in a down-to-earth way with cautious and conscientious.
In the following days, we had much contacts and she would tell us some of her experience occasionally, which was more complex than we were: she encountered with family misfortune at age of 6. In order to alleviate economical burden of the family, she learnt to sew insoles and sold them in the market; when she was in grade 3 or 4, she often asked for leave from school and sold pickles, salted vegetable etc in Fenglong Street or streets nearby if there was street market. Knowing what she had done, the classmates dubbed an indecent nickname for her, for which she beat that boy. I was surprised and hard to believe that such a little child could sew some articles for daily use and did some retail trade, but it was the fact!
She dropped out before finishing the primary school because her family was poor and she had younger brother and sister to support. In order to make some money to subsidize the family, she did many things which the peers would not do: temporary work, selling vegetable, even looking after child for relatives. When the peers were enjoying the carefree happiness of childhood, she had learned to survive and tasted the hardships and setbacks of life. Just at age of 16, she left home to do manual work, fighting for the happiness in the future.
In 1978 she joined in CIBA Construction Team at age of 16. Each day, she was dirty and with mud on the face often due to working with sand, soil or slurry——stirring mortar, painting walls etc. She grew up with the development of the earthwork team step by step. Nowadays, the earthwork team developed into a group enterprise and she grew from an ordinary worker to deputy director of production section. It is inevitable for this outcome. Her humility and hardworking made her never fall behind others. She attended any training and passed related test. With only primary school education, she passed professional qualifications assessments, such as "Measurement Statistics" and "Professional Machinery Technicians". She told me that it was a rigorous test for her to study Measure Statistic. In order to pass the examination, she would read book whenever she had time; when others had left after class, she would stay to ask some questions until she made sense of them.
It was more difficult to learn machinery drawing reading and mapping. She followed the senior workers to learn from the scratch: drawing and lofting in third view according to the material object. With the purpose of learning it as quickly as possible, she was never be lazy, reading drawings and mapping if
