Over the next few days, Liu Li became obsessed with the mountain of documents.
The office faces north, so it's damp and chilly in winter with little sunshine. She spends all day huddled in her window seat, wrapped in a thick coat she brought from her dorm, flipping through documents with one hand and holding a pen in the other, occasionally jotting things down in her new notebook. When she encounters an unfamiliar foreign word, she lightly circles it with a pencil; when she sees a term she only vaguely understands, she diligently copies it down.
The pile of documents was incredibly diverse. There were translated articles from foreign journals about "air-jet spinning" and "shuttleless looms," with incredibly complex diagrams illustrating their principles; there were lists of problems submitted by several domestic textile machinery factories, mentioning issues such as "spindle speed not being high enough," "short needle lifespan," and "excessive noise"; and there were also a large number of production reports from various cooperating factories, interspersed with parts drawings and quality inspection reports, some of the data recorded in a scattered and disorganized manner, making it a headache to read.
This job is really boring. Unlike in the factory, where you can touch things, listen to sounds, and discuss solutions with the masters when you encounter problems, here you just deal with pieces of paper, which makes your eyes dizzy.
Zhou Wei and Sun Mei were either reading or drawing, and sometimes they would be called over by Team Leader Chen to discuss issues, which were all topics that Liu Li couldn't get a word in edgewise. They would occasionally glance at Liu Li, seeing her buried in those basic documents, their eyes carrying a hint of "this is all the newbie can do."
Liu Li wasn't oblivious, but she remained silent. She had her own plans.
Since she was asked to organize the information, she decided to do it properly. Unlike some people who might just categorize and write a summary to get it over with, she saw herself as a doctor, and these documents as the patients' medical records. She had to find the real "cause" from this huge pile of messy information.
She discovered that the sophisticated foreign literature sometimes described problems that were completely irrelevant to the actual issues encountered in domestic factories—it was like trying to fix a bicycle with airplane blueprints. The problems reported by the factories often only described the symptoms, such as "parts keep breaking down," but didn't explain why they were breaking down. Was it due to substandard materials? Insufficient machining precision? Or a flaw in the design itself? Many of these questions remained unanswered.
She was incredibly observant. If she saw a factory complaining about a certain type of bushing wearing out quickly, she would look up the drawings for that bushing to see its structure, the material it was made of, and the heat treatment requirements. If she saw reports that knitting needles were prone to breaking, she would check the processing records for those needles to see if the heat treatment process was not properly controlled.
She even grouped similar problems reported by different factories together. And wow, this grouping revealed something interesting. Several factories mentioned, almost simultaneously, that a certain key moving part couldn't maintain precision under high-speed operation, leading to significant machine vibration and rapid wear. This seemed to be a widespread and persistent problem.
Over the course of a few days, her new notebook was already filled with over a dozen pages of densely packed notes. Besides the required categorization, there were also many of her own annotations and questions:
"Is the roller vibration reported by Factory A and the loose bearing housing reported by Factory B from the same source?"
"Can the novel surface treatment technology mentioned in the literature be applied to the wear problem reported by Factory C?"
"Is the design tolerance for this part too stringent, making it difficult to consistently meet the current machining standards?"
She didn't rush to show off, nor did she discuss these findings with Team Leader Chen or Zhou Wei. She knew that as a newcomer with limited experience, it wouldn't matter how much she talked, it would be better to produce something tangible in the end.
Silently, like a worker ant, she painstakingly sifted through the seemingly insignificant pile of documents, searching for any clues that might have been overlooked. She devoted herself more wholeheartedly to this first, seemingly marginal task than anyone else.
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