I'll debug it for you line by line. If you change one line back, you'll have to do another assignment.
"I'll debug it for you line by line. If you change one line back, it'll be another assignment."
56.
On the eve of a major battle, there is always a sense of impending doom and impending storm.
Senior Sister Hui reacted quickly, pushing the irrelevant people out of the lab. She pulled the clueless student from Beiluan University aside and whispered to her, "Your seniors are under a lot of pressure, so don't bother them."
Tan Xiaoxiao didn't understand, but she vaguely sensed an eerie atmosphere. From the moment she entered the lab in the morning, she saw that the seat where Senior Lan Jian had been sitting was now empty, and Senior Chongming was sitting alone in the innermost seat furthest from the main entrance, typing away on the keyboard with a livid face.
She assumed that Senior Lan Jian had deliberately given up her seat for her, so she pretended to be reserved and walked up to Senior Chongming's seat to ask, "Senior, the teacher asked me to come and report to you today, so I'll be sitting in this seat from now on. Do you mind?"
Chongming's hands, which had been frantically typing away at the code, finally stopped. He looked directly at Tan Xiaoxiao and asked, "Are you asking for my opinion?"
Tan Xiaoxiao was stung by his cold tone, and her voice lowered. "Yes, you wouldn't be taking revenge on me for what I did to you before, would you?"
Senior Sister Hui and Niga were still in the lab. After Tan Xiaoxiao finished speaking, she was about to pull out a chair and sit down. At this moment, Meng Lanjian came out of the storage room with something. As soon as the electric door opened, she saw Tan Xiaoxiao sitting down next to Chongming.
"Since you asked me, why did you make the decision without listening to me?" Chongming's voice rang out in the laboratory with a resounding tone. Even Niga, who couldn't understand the language, couldn't help but turn his head to look over. Chongming leaned against the back of the chair next to him with one hand, his gaze sharp and cold. "There are so many empty seats in the laboratory. I finally managed to make this a bit more spacious. Could you please find another table?"
It's finally gotten a bit more spacious.
Meng Lanjian thought to herself, "These words are clearly directed at her."
She walked over to Tan Xiaoxiao, who looked sullen, and pointed to where Ma Yuehe had originally been sitting. "Xiaoxiao, you've come to the wrong place. This is your spot."
On her first day at the heavy particle lab, Tan Xiaoxiao's opinion of her fellow villager, Senior Meng, who was rumored to be a fierce and intimidating figure on the twelfth floor, changed drastically—Senior Meng's tone of voice was so gentle and kind!
"Senior, thank you so much for helping me arrange a seat!" Tan Xiaoxiao quickly approached Meng Lanjian, who was walking alone on the inner side of the tree-lined path, on her way back from buying food. "Let me help you carry it!"
Meng Lanjian had two lunch boxes in her hand, one from Chongming. She had bought it for Guan Shaoxiao after his repeated urging, and she was still worrying about how to give it to him when this unexpected gift came along.
This morning, when Chongming and Lanjian arrived at the lab, Lanjian was still thinking about what to say when they bumped into Xue Xiang, who was about to leave with some materials. He was going to attend a full-day meeting at the Fourth Nuclear Division. Seeing Chongming and Lanjian enter one after the other, he smiled at Lanjian and said, "I see you've already set up your seats. When Tan Xiaoxiao arrives, could you look after her for a while?" Then he turned to Chongming and said, "I'm planning to have her study Ma Bao's stuff. Could you help me think of a topic for her when you have time?"
He left after giving his instructions, leaving Lan Jian and Chong Ming standing by her new seat, looking at each other in bewilderment.
Lan Jian felt a little guilty. With Senior Sister Hui not around, she suddenly didn't know how to explain the situation to him. So she looked away from Chongming's burning gaze and stammered, "On the day of the year-end banquet, the teacher told me that there were empty seats in the lab after Ma Yuehe left. He felt it was a bit crowded for me and you to sit together, so he asked me to move. He also said he was hesitant about whether to take Tan Xiaoxiao into the lab... I thought it was commendable that she was determined to change labs, so I told the teacher that she could try taking on Xiao Ma's problems. That way, we wouldn't even have to move the computer."
Chongming was tall, and he stood silently in front of Meng Lanjian, looking down at her. The oppressive aura emanating from him was overwhelming. Lanjian forced herself to explain, "I agreed to change seats, but I was afraid that something might go wrong and I would change my mind, so I moved the seats when I came back to the lab that night."
<
What a Xue Xiang! What a Meng Lanjian!
The two of them teamed up to play the game of acting first and informing later. Chongming exposed her without any mercy, "You're quite good at going with the flow. He meant to have Tan Xiaoxiao take Ma Yuehe's questions, but he asked you to move seats first. You were tricked by him and still obediently let him arrange it. You're such a sensible student."
"Wen Chu and Nie Mumu didn't want to take on Ma Bao's questions, and the teacher had his reasons for doing so."
"Then why didn't you tell me anything during the entire holiday?"
Meng Lanjian frowned slightly. "I thought the teacher would tell you."
"Don't think that way!" Chongming was enraged by her evasive attitude. She clearly had ulterior motives, which was why she had kept it from him until today. "Don't you just want things to be settled so that I can't refuse Xue Xiang anymore? Do you really want me to mentor others? You've already prepared for the written and oral exams for your qualification, so you don't need me to teach you, right?"
He bombarded her with questions, and Lan Jian couldn't keep up. Just as the two were about to start arguing, Senior Sister Hui came in from outside. Seeing that both of them looked upset, she launched her first attempt at reconciliation that day.
In the end, one of them sat down where he was, while the other turned back to his original seat, like a pair of estranged lovers who had parted ways.
Before she knew it, most of the day had passed. Tan Xiaoxiao still had classes. Looking at the unopened lunchbox on Chongming's desk, she sensed something was wrong. She walked over to Senior Sister Hui and whispered to her that Chongming hadn't eaten. Senior Sister Hui couldn't stand seeing someone in the lab not eating properly and having such a chaotic schedule. She walked over to Chongming, picked up her chopsticks, and shoved them in front of Chongming's screen. "Chongming, eat."
Chongming stopped typing away on the keyboard, which he had been doing for who knows how long, took the chopsticks and placed them on his left. "I have no appetite and no time."
"What's wrong with you today?" Senior Sister Hui pulled out the chair that Lan Jian had originally been sitting in and plopped down to have a heart-to-heart talk with him. "Are you unhappy that Lan Jian changed seats?"
Chongming did not deny it, but revealed a mocking smile that was both angry and sarcastic. "Now she's the senior in this lab. If she wants to change seats or arrange a special project for me, she has to do whatever she wants."
So it turns out that the senior's position was challenged and he was unhappy... Senior Sister Hui misunderstood and laughed, "Chongming, don't be angry, don't be angry. Who in this lab can shake your position as the senior? Lan Jian's matter of the special project student was also arranged by your Xue Xiang. Why are you taking it out on her? You two are the director's precious students. How can you, the last disciple, be angry with the youngest one?"
The peacemaker, misunderstanding the situation, added fuel to the fire, making Chongming even more agitated. He stood up and said, "I'm going out for a bit."
"Hey Chongming! You haven't eaten yet! What time is it? Where are you going?"
"Whoever bought it, eats it." Chongming rolled up his sleeves, grabbed the wool coat from the back of the chair, and draped it over his arm. "I won't be back for a while."
Not coming back? Where are they going?
Just as Hui was about to ask for clarification, she saw Lan Jian enter the lab with a cup of hot coffee in his hand. The lab was instantly filled with the rich aroma of coffee. The two senior students bumped into each other. One stopped in her tracks, protecting the coffee cup, while the other brushed past without looking at her.
Seeing the two senior students, who had been inseparable and playfully bickering in the second year of junior high, silently waging war over changing seats, Senior Sister Hui shook her head and sent a message to Xue Xiang. It was only the first day back at work after the New Year, and the situation was already far from optimistic.
Meng Lanjian cannot drink coffee.
Because of her caffeine allergy, sometimes even a cup of milk tea in the afternoon would leave her tossing and turning all night. Chongming sat in the reactor control room, quietly pondering what Meng Lanjian was really up to.
As she pondered, her thoughts drifted away, recalling the little details of the times when the two of them sat together.
Meng Lanjian has a quick, erratic mind and is actually quite inattentive and lacks focus. She's not naturally suited for research; whenever she manages to settle down and write code, she makes frequent, basic mistakes. She was somewhat good at grasping new things when she first started out.
She learns quickly out of interest, but forgets just as quickly because she doesn't like to reinforce what she's learning, and eventually becomes bored. Chongming patiently helped her debug several times, discovering that the errors were still due to carelessness or a lack of critical thinking, revealing that she had absolutely no interest in programming. But she was a PhD student in science and engineering; her undergraduate master's degree relied on theory to get high marks and conduct research—that was fundamental. If she were still going around in circles with code now, wasting half a day on data processing, it wouldn't be right.
To help her overcome this escapist mentality, Chongming once told her, "I'll help you debug line by line. If you change a line, you'll have to go back and do an extra assignment."
Since then, her careless mistakes have decreased significantly, and she has become much more attentive to coding. However, she still doesn't like coding, and sometimes she gets scared when she sees him pull out his lab logs, fearing that he will assign her more homework.
Their seats were next to each other, and she dawdled right under his nose, which he always turned a blind eye to. One minute she'd ask him to play some music, the next she'd go into the storage room to look at senior students' papers. She was fascinated by all sorts of theoretical formula derivations and graph reproductions, but she utterly despised writing code.
Once, her mouse ran out of battery, and there were no new batteries in the lab. So she poured out a whole box of old batteries and laid them out like dominoes at the dividing line between the two of them. She picked up a piece of battery and bit it into her mouth like she was gnawing on an eel. After biting off two pieces, she would open the back cover of the mouse and replace it. If that didn't work, she would bite off another piece and replace it again.
Chongming teased her about her strong teeth, but he felt helpless. She would rather spend her time biting the battery than go out to buy a new one so that her program could run smoothly and start the next one.
Forcing someone to do something against their will is not in Chongming's nature. He would sometimes soften and indulge her when she didn't want to do something, letting her think of other ways. However, her doctoral qualification exam was just around the corner, with only three months left. He and Xue Xiang could help her with the topic of her thesis proposal and oral exam, but among the written theoretical exams, he was most worried about her computer language subject.
Nanlu University's predecessor was the North-South Federal Polytechnic University, whose strength in science and engineering far surpasses that of comprehensive universities like Nanhua University. Many of the senior professors at the Nuclear Research Institute are from the computer science department, and they set incredibly difficult computer language questions for the doctoral qualifying exams every year, sometimes even requiring handwritten code on the exam paper, practically pushing people to the point of failing.
If a candidate fails even one subject in the written exam, they will fail the doctoral qualifying exam that year. Each doctoral candidate only has two chances to take the exam. For those from other departments who are pursuing a joint doctoral program abroad, there is generally an unwritten rule that they must pass the exam on their first attempt.
The director knew that countless eyes were watching Meng Lanjian throughout the nuclear research institute, so he also had this expectation of her. However, he cherished his youngest student and didn't openly pressure her, but secretly gave Chongming a lot of past exam questions to compile for Lanjian. Chongming had planned to supervise her exams every day after the New Year when he arrived at the lab, but she unexpectedly changed the seating arrangement, catching him off guard.
He wasn't worried that she would cheat if she went to another seat to do her homework, but he still wouldn't feel at ease when she wasn't by his side.
And then there's Xue Xiang, that troublemaker. He's used to being a hands-off manager. As soon as Ma Yue and Yi Yi left, he fantasized about dumping all three university students on him, completely forgetting that he still had Meng Lanjian, this hot potato, to look after.
bite!
The phone screen suddenly lit up with a message from the troublemaker himself: "During this long holiday, Lan Jian didn't even tell you about her wanting to change seats?"
Chongming suddenly let out a "hiss" sound from his nose.
*Although I posted it in the comments section before, I still think this little skit is very fitting for today:
Daily life of three generations of a family at the Nuclear Research Institute:
Director: Growing flowers, drinking tea, and protecting his own.
Xue Xiang: Vacation, working himself to the bone, troublemaker.
Chongming: Moving bricks, protecting one's wife, wiping one's bottom.
Lanjian: stuck at a hurdle, senior brother, visiting someone's home.
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