The thing I mentioned last time about that company turning its own building into a hotel for the college entrance exam season wasn’t quite right.
It’s not that they built a hotel themselves. They sold the building to a new owner, and the new owner is the one trying to convert the office building into a hotel.
The renovation crew has been working around the clock, which has already produced a nice little collection of incidents: a minor water leak flooded the elevator area, strong wind knocked over the site fencing and hit an elderly man, and sloppy electrical work caused a small fire. None of it was especially serious in terms of damage or losses, but any hope of finishing before this year’s exam season is completely gone.
This was the state of the site on May 31:
You have to admire the spirit of locking the barn after the horse has bolted. At this rate, finishing before the 2026 exam season should be no problem.
Maybe the owner is trying to recover some cash, because a Cotti Coffee appeared at one corner of the building almost instantly. I have no idea how many cups of coffee it would take to earn back the price of the building.
Since it’s close to home and had opening promotions, it quickly became my wife’s top weekend pick.
At noon on the first day of the Dragon Boat Festival holiday, she woke up wanting coffee, opened the mini-app, and found that the store was only offering hot drinks, no iced ones. So she sent me to check. If the ice machine was broken, I was supposed to go buy from 7-Eleven instead. She had already decided she wanted iced coffee with zongzi.
When I got there, it turned out the ice machine was fine. The staff had restocked ice the previous day but forgotten to update the system, so the platform assumed the store couldn’t make iced drinks.
The two employees were standing there joking about themselves: no wonder they hadn’t received a single order all morning. They’d thought people were just sleeping in because of the holiday.
The property management office also has new blood now. The previous building manager went home to have a baby, and the new young guy is actually pretty serious about getting things done.
My wife had complained that the battery-swapping station for e-bikes downstairs was too close to the building and felt unsafe. The previous two managers never solved it. This new guy came in, unplugged the power, and said it would be moved.
The neighbors had also complained that the entrance to the underground parking garage was too dark. Within a month, he had a ring of LED lights installed there.
Of course, he can’t just spend money all day. A few days later, a "scrap recycling machine" showed up by the entrance. You scan a code, the platform gives your junk an estimate, and then you toss it into the machine. A shiny little IoT gadget for selling off recyclables.
I have zero respect for this kind of thing. Never mind the amount of privacy you hand over just by using the app — the more embarrassing part is that capital has now sunk to competing with scrap collectors for a living.
With middle school entrance registration approaching, our kid’s ranking among roughly 22,000 test takers is somewhere around 8,500 to 12,000. That puts her roughly between the tail end of the key-school quota range and the level of ordinary general high schools. The rules for secondary school admissions vary by place and also change every few years, so there’s no point trying to unpack the whole system here. In practical terms, the task these past few weeks has been visiting regular public and private high schools.
School visits are actually interesting enough to deserve their own piece, but I haven’t really been in the mood lately, so I’ll just lump it all together here.
Over the past three weeks, we visited (6-2) public general high schools within the urban area and 7 private high schools.
Public schools generally don’t worry about whether they can fill seats, so the people meeting parents are usually at the dean or academic-director level. Private schools, by contrast, all treat enrollment like war. Every one of them sends out the head principal in person.
One public school got crossed off my list immediately because I found cigarette butts in the boys’ restroom. I instantly sent my wife to check the girls’ restroom. Same story there.
Another public school handled that issue much more cleverly: they had blocked the restroom entrance with flower stands, so parents simply weren’t allowed in.
At one of the better-ranked public schools, about half the people in the display board had gone to Liaoning University, and many of them were class years 2016 and 2017. That immediately gave me the feeling that the school probably wasn’t very strong. I graduated from Liaoning University myself, so I know exactly how watery that 211 label is. There’s a reason I hardly ever mention it.
The private school principals, meanwhile, spent a lot of time badmouthing each other.
A said B’s teaching building was structurally unsafe. B said C had lost a large number of teachers last year and never replaced them. C said B and D had their enrollment quotas cut after education bureau audits found issues involving diverted funds. D said C often didn’t really teach properly and relied too heavily on pre-made video lessons. E said D only cared about money and kept finding creative ways to squeeze parents beyond normal tuition, such as running “bridging classes” before the first year even began. F said the top management at A were no saints either — they had bought up a lot of housing around the school just to rent it to parents who accompany their children, and were colluding to keep rents from falling. E also said D treated students differently, and that the non-key classes were basically left to fend for themselves.
And so on.
After hearing everyone out, two schools were eliminated in the first round.
E was out because it runs fully militarized management, requires all students to board, and even requires girls to cut their hair short. If I tried to make our daughter cut her hair short, she’d probably split me in half with a knife.
B was out because the principal kept repeating during the presentation that their boss was rich, worked in real estate, and had no interest in making money off students. The man was around seventy, and I honestly can’t tell whether he really doesn’t understand the current climate or is pretending not to. In the past two years, people in real estate have been very interested in making money wherever they can. Add in what the other principals said about audits, and I’m genuinely worried the boss could just run away one day.
There was also one funny discovery. The principal of School A was the homeroom teacher of the class next to mine back in high school. The homeroom teacher of A’s senior-year Tsinghua/Peking University prep class, who is also their lead math teacher, was the homeroom teacher of the other class next to mine.
Back when I was in high school, our class was the key class, and the two of them were only young teachers in their thirties, nowhere near senior enough to teach us. By the time our cohort graduated, they left together for Yuming High School, which had just changed its admissions range. Suddenly they became city-level “famous teachers.” Now, even after retirement, they can still throw their weight around in private schools.
So yes, “famous teachers” are only so magical. In the end, it still depends on the students.
My previous phone finally got smashed badly enough that I had to replace it.
I don’t play mobile games, don’t watch short videos, and don’t care about taking photos, so I’m perfectly happy with a budget phone. Still, I spent 2,100 yuan on the new one, because my wife reimbursed me.
After transferring the data and switching the SIM over, I discovered I couldn’t get online. My first thought was that maybe the IoT card was locked to the old device, so I switched it back — still no internet.
I called my cousin, who had helped me get the card in the first place, and only then found out that those IoT cards are no longer allowed to be sold, and yes, once you change phones, they really do stop working.
Since I still have plenty of annual leave and it resets on July 1 anyway, I just took a day off, went to see her, and got a new regular phone card with more data than I could possibly use.
When I got home, I updated every app that absolutely insists on being tied to a mobile number.
Everything went smoothly except for the prized internal messaging app used by our own group. That one managed to fail both ways: I couldn’t log in with the old number, and I still couldn’t log in with the new number either.
A state-owned enterprise through and through.
And of course I picked a bad day to do all this. Not a single app would let me change my display name or profile picture right away, which means I’ll have to spend extra time dealing with it again over the weekend.