The engineer on her first day of work was dismissed

The internal conflict at the High Long plant, considered an exemplary model within the Hong Group, began following the arrival of the new director, Zangtao, who took office with the stated intention of asserting authority and correcting what he described as stains of indiscipline. As a first measure, Zangtao enforced the recently issued workplace regulations against senior engineer Lin Wey, a key technical asset to the factory. The penalty consisted of the complete withholding of her year-end bonus of 100,000 due to a two-minute delay, ignoring that the professional had stayed working until four in the morning to test new equipment.

Far from begging or yielding to management pressure, Lin Wey signed the sanction notice and decided to strictly align her duties with official regulations. For the past ten years, the engineer had been accustomed to arriving an hour before her shift to turn on and calibrate the machinery—a voluntary effort that ensured the workshop's optimal operation. Following the punishment, the specialist limited her tasks strictly to her contracted hours, clocking in at the very last second and turning off the equipment promptly when the end-of-shift bell rang at five in the afternoon.

Tension at the plant escalated with the hiring of Hangu, also known as Shaolin, a recent university graduate introduced as the factory director's nephew and a relative of the group's chief executive officer. Despite his lack of practical experience in the technical area, Zangtao appointed the young man to head maintenance to prove that the factory could operate without the senior engineer. However, the new hire's inexperience caused immediate failures on the production line, yielding a batch of defective products that failed infrared inspection tests.

The issue directly affected the A7 machine, the facility's most valuable piece of equipment, imported from Germany and specialized in manufacturing key optical components for lithography machines. Faced with a torque overload in the servomotor and a deviation in the robotic arm, management attempted to hold Lin Wey responsible for alleged negligence. However, the engineer pointed out that regulations forbid arbitrarily calibrating machinery outside working hours, and that the director's nephew's improvised repair attempts had only worsened the flaws in the parts.

When called upon to diagnose the breakdown, Lin Wey pointed out burrs and a lack of calibration in the core pressure sensor, but refused to solve the problem empirically. Sticking to article five of the internal regulations, she demanded following the operating procedure step by step, including recording readings with an infrared thermometer. When the exact end of her shift arrived, the engineer halted the data solidification process without finalizing calibration, citing the explicit rule prohibiting the operation of delicate equipment at the end of the shift to prevent safety accidents.

Amid the operational paralysis, the engineer declined an external job offer presented by Zuboquian, a professional trained in technical programming in Germany. Zuboquian, who recently acquired the largest machining plant in eastern Granat, offered Lin Wey complete management freedom and her choice of salary to join his company. Despite the favorable terms, the specialist rejected the offer out of a commitment to remain at the plant and preserve the work to which her former mentor dedicated his entire life until his retirement.

Engineer Lin Wey's stance has placed the management of the High Long plant at an administrative and technical crossroads. While Director Zangtao maintains that factory rules supersede all circumstances, the optical components production line remains halted due to the incompetence of the newly assigned personnel. The inflexible enforcement of regulations has ultimately backfired on management, which now faces losses from scrapped materials and the risk of stalling the company's commercial commitments.