On October 16, 2025
Today I went for an interview. These past few days, my mood and thoughts have been quite complicated. On one hand, I feel fear towards employment due to long-term idleness, and I want to maintain my current decayed lifestyle. On the other hand, the pressures of life force me to look for a job to make a living. Sometimes I even consider fleeing back to my hometown to continue living parasitically, but after thinking it over, I feel that I have previously fought some ideological battles with the help of others, voluntarily giving up comfortable living conditions and the prospects of social mobility that my family hoped for. If I go back, I will definitely face questions from my family, which makes me afraid. On the other hand, I believe I can’t continue living parasitically and that it restricts my personal freedom, so I finally decided to look for a job.
The first job I found was at a factory that looked quite large, producing laptops. It seemed to be a monopoly enterprise, but during the interview, they rejected my application citing my obesity (although recently I have become fat due to overeating and not working out, this does not affect my ability to work, but the factory’s regulations are ridiculous, requiring employees to have a normal BMI during health checks). I initially wanted to give up and look for other jobs tomorrow, but I thought about it and realized that sooner or later I would have to face employment, and delaying one more day would only make my situation worse. So I decided to try an interview through an agency at another factory (usually, such opportunities are rare because many agencies deliberately schedule interviews at the same time, forcing workers to interview at only one or two factories a day, pushing workers to choose factories with poor working conditions due to employment difficulties and financial pressure).
This second factory also produces digital products but looks like a small workshop, or in other words, not a monopoly-level enterprise. Compared to the factories I worked in before, it is much smaller in size and employs far fewer workers. The wage is 21.5 yuan per hour, with an 8-hour workday if no overtime, and possibly up to thirteen and a half hours if overtime is involved. It’s quite outrageous, but considering survival pressure, I accepted these conditions.
Because of its small scale, this factory seems to lack the comprehensive control over workers that larger monopoly firms have. For example, workers do not need to give a one-month notice before leaving; they just need to inform the management of their approximate departure time and negotiate to confirm it. Also, the HR department seems small, probably because the number of workers is low. Generally, in monopoly firms, the agency handles the entire process of hiring, interviews, and resignations, but here, the agency only handles bringing workers in and signing contracts; other procedures are managed directly by the factory’s HR. Regarding uniform distribution, initially, the capitalists didn’t dare to give uniforms to workers, which was strange—probably afraid workers would feel the work environment was bad and run away. They said uniforms would be issued after two weeks of work, during which workers wear their own clothes and just wear a factory cap.
After signing the contract with three other workers in the break room, something funny happened. One worker, about 36 years old and married with children, was pressured by the HR to take a more hazardous position. They even said that knowing his age, they were giving him this assignment because of pressure, and that this position had subsidies, claiming it was for his benefit, and wanted to assign him to an even worse environment. It was shameless. However, this worker didn’t respond much, but in the end, he was still assigned to that position.
It was until around 4 p.m. that the team leader took us to see the workshop. My department is responsible for spray painting the shells of digital products, including coloring, baking, and inspection. The smell of the paint was quite strong and unpleasant. Also, the factory’s working hours calculation system was ridiculous—excluding the time for morning meetings from working hours, forcing workers to contribute an extra ten minutes of free rest time daily.
By around 5 p.m., we clocked out. Although we didn’t do any productive work during these four hours, it still counted as working hours. This was somewhat better, probably because the small factory was struggling to recruit workers, so they made this compromise.
Then I went to handle the dormitory check-in. The dormitory doesn’t require a deposit, which was a bit novel, and it has an elevator—I’m living on the fifth floor. The environment is decent, a bit more spacious than the dormitory at my previous job, with a balcony for drying clothes. However, the water and electricity fees are also ridiculous—an absolute minimum of 70 yuan per month, regardless of usage, with any excess charged separately. This is another form of exploitation by capitalists.
That’s all I can think of recording for now. I’ll stop here for the moment.
