Back to 80: My literary life.

Chapter 815 This is a state-owned enterprise
This time, Fang Minghua declined Sun Yuanchao's company and did not take the Santana. Instead, she followed the employees who went to work at the foot of the mountain in the morning, took the factory's commuter bus and headed straight down the mountain.

Driving along the not very wide road, Fang Minghua saw through the car window that there was a railway faintly visible along the road not far to the left. Later he learned that this railway was built by the state specifically for Factory 182 to transport aircraft parts, coal and other resources.

Compared to the mountain, the terrain at the foot of the mountain is much flatter, and the factory area is also surrounded by a wall. Outside the wall are large tracts of rapeseed flowers in full bloom. Fang Minghua is used to seeing noisy streets outside factories in Xijing City, but this scene now gives him a different feeling.

With the letter of introduction issued by the factory, Fang Minghua quickly entered the factory and found Ke Bing working in a gray building.

In a somewhat messy office, he and a group of technicians were discussing something while holding a blueprint full of electrical circuits.

There are more than ten technicians in the large office, including old, middle-aged and young people.

"Chairman Fang, you're here? Come to my office and sit down first. I'll be there soon." Ke Bing greeted.

Ke Bing's office was right next door. It was small and somewhat shabby, with an old-fashioned desk at one end and various books and numbered file boxes in the cabinet. Fang Minghua didn't dare to move.

After a while, Ke Bing came over and said to Fang Minghua, "Come on, I'll take you around."

"Will it not affect your work?"

"It's okay. After the regular meeting, everyone will go about their own business."

After leaving the office building, Ke Bing took Fang Minghua to walk around the factory.

Compared with the mountain, the area below the mountain has a typical state-owned enterprise factory layout, with rows of workshops, one of which is a giant workshop that is particularly eye-catching.

"That's the aircraft assembly workshop, the largest in Asia," Ke Bing explained.

"Can I go in and take a look?" Fang Minghua asked.

"Ordinary people can't go in. I can take you in to have a look, but you can't get on the plane." Ke Bing said with a smile.

Following Ke Bing into the final assembly workshop, I saw three transport planes parked inside and workers standing on the scaffolding busy at work.

It was obvious that Ke Bing came down often, and many workers knew him and greeted him.

"Director Ke, you're just in time. I was just about to call you." A young man wearing a safety helmet, who looked like a technician, held up a diagram and said to him hurriedly, "Look, your place and the system room are doing ironwork again."

Ke Bing took a look at the blueprint and immediately frowned.

"That's not right. I've told Director Ma from the system room that this location is reserved for our special room. Let me go and take a look." After saying that, he followed the technician into the cabin.

Fang Minghua was a little curious and wanted to follow in, but after thinking it over, he didn't move.

It is better to abide by the rules and regulations.

After a long while, Ke Song came down and it seemed that the problem was solved.

"What does blacksmithing mean?" Fang Minghua asked curiously.

"This is our idiom." Ke Bing explained with a smile: "It means a certain part of the plane, such as the place just now. There is a hydraulic pipe installed on the blueprint of their system room, which occupies the space of our special system. One of our cables cannot be installed, and there is a conflict between them. We call it iron-making."

"When encountering this kind of thing, the two departments need to coordinate with each other. I just asked the workshop technician to change the drawing so that the cable passes through the side. I will go to Director Ma to settle the account later!
Is this how you assemble an airplane?
Fang Minghua was stunned.

Seeing his expression, Ke Bing laughed: "Surprised? This is just like decorating a house. There are often conflicts between various pipes and lines. Of course, important parts cannot be moved, but some minor parts can be temporarily modified."

"Wouldn't that be a mess?" Fang Minghua asked again.

"It's not a mess. I just dealt with it temporarily so as not to affect the assembly progress. This modified drawing will be returned to our special room soon. The technicians will revise the base map again, and then it will be signed by other relevant departments of the design institute, such as the system and structure, and finally signed by the director. Some will also be reviewed and signed by the military representative. Finally, it will be printed into a blueprint and distributed to relevant units for filing. The technicians behind can see this blueprint and know where the cable has been modified."

That's it!

Fang Minghua suddenly realized that it was not just what he wanted.

“The steps are quite complicated.”

"Yeah, it increases my workload and it's annoying! So I'm going to settle the score with that guy named Ma later!" Ke Bing looked angrily.

Fang Minghua smiled. It seemed that this kind of argument happened frequently.

After that, we visited the cable workshop, heat treatment workshop, and flight test workshop. The workers were all busy. "Director Ke, it seems that you are very busy in production." Fang Minghua said as he walked.

"It's only been these past two years that we've been busy. Before that, we had nothing to do." Ke Bing said with a smile, "To be honest, people often get bored at work and go to the riverside outside the factory to bask in the sun."

Ah?
"Come on, I'll take you to see it."

Fang Minghua followed Ke Bing out of the back gate of the factory and saw low brick houses on both sides of the road with people living in them.

"Those living here are family members of factory employees. Housing is extremely tight in our factory, and some workers' families have nowhere to live, so they have to build their own houses," Ke Bing explained.

Fang Minghua nodded. He also saw rows of such simple houses on the mountain.

After walking for less than a few minutes, we arrived at a river. The water was clear and there were lush trees on both sides.

"This place is good for fishing." Fang Minghua said as he looked at the slowly flowing river.

"Yes, fishing and bird hunting. In the past few years, there was no work in the factory, so we often took air guns and walked up along the river bank. There were trees on both sides, such as turtle doves, sparrows, and night herons. We could shoot more than a dozen birds in half a day."

"Your class is very colorful." Fang Minghua said with a smile.

"There's nothing we can do. There's no work to do in the factory. What's the point of sitting in the office all day? Some people left, and some people stayed in the factory to waste their days."

"gone?"

"Yes, they went to the south, to the Flower City, Shenzhen, and Dongguan. Especially Dongguan, many people went there. In the early 1990s, many people left the factory, especially our design institute. Someone counted and found that one-third of them left!"

"So many?" Fang Minghua was surprised after hearing this.

"Yes, these assigned college students don't have as deep feelings for the factory as President Wang and Chairman Sun, nor do they have a sense of belonging." Ke Bing explained:

"Just think about it, students who graduated from famous universities such as Beihang University, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Northwestern Polytechnical University, and even Tsinghua University, who had gone through thousands of hardships to get into college and lived in a big city for four years, are suddenly assigned to a place where "the fragrance of rice flowers can be smelled everywhere". How do they feel?"

"Plus, the factory's performance is not good, and wages are not paid in full and on time. They are delayed for several months. Who can bear it?"

"Then why don't you leave?" Fang Minghua asked back.

"Haha, I got married. I found a guy who works in a factory. My parents-in-law wouldn't let me go out because they were worried that I would run away and never come back." Ke Bing said with a smile.

Ke Bing told Fang Minghua that in the 1980s, college students like them who were assigned to the factory from school were very popular. They were given the status of cadres when they came in and basically worked in the design institute and various departments of the factory. The working environment was good, so many employees in the factory were willing to marry their daughters to them.

"My wife is a factory employee. She graduated from the factory's technical school and works in the workshop, which is the final assembly workshop we just went to, but we didn't meet her." Ke Bing said.

"As an undergraduate student from a prestigious university, don't you feel it's a loss to hire a worker?" Fang Minghua asked deliberately.

"Let's put aside the relationship for now. There are also advantages to finding a factory employee. You will have someone to lean on in the factory, which will make it easier to get housing and even promotions."

Ke Bing smiled and said, "These large state-owned enterprises are actually a closed small society, full of human relationships and social conventions. As a local of Chenggu, I am actually an outsider here."

"My father-in-law is now the workshop director of a sheet metal workshop on the mountain. He can be considered a middle-level manager in the factory."

"Excuse me, your promotion to the director of the special office, a mid-level leader, was also because of your father-in-law?"

"Haha, Chairman Fang, you are wrong. College students like us who were assigned here in the 1980s should have been taking on the responsibilities long ago, but our positions are occupied by a bunch of workers, peasants and soldiers. There is nothing we can do about it."

“Workers, peasants and soldiers college students?”

"Yes, the earliest people in our factory were Mr. Wang and Mr. Liu, who came here in the early 1960s. They were also serious college graduates with very high skills."

"Later in the 1970s, the country abolished the college entrance examination. People went to college through recommendation and were called workers, peasants and soldiers. To be honest, they did not receive systematic education and their level was average, but they had qualifications and backgrounds, and now they are middle-level managers in the factory. People like us have to stand aside for now."

"To be honest, if it weren't for the development of this early warning aircraft project, this group of people would never be able to accomplish it, and it would not be our turn to step forward." Ke Bing sighed.

This is a state-owned enterprise.

Fang Minghua sighed in his heart.

(End of this chapter)