Three months ago, my director asked me to buy a FON router. I had searched for it hard and finally got it through Taobao website. It was used by R&D department for analysis, but I paid for it with my own money. My director never mentioned that again.

    A months later, he asked me to buy two Linksys routers for analysis, I promised him promptly. I paid for it again with my own money. There was no need for me to say, my director didn’t mention it either. The price wasn’t low for me, however, I decided to be silent without asking for reimbursement.

    Last week, my director needed to buy two 3G modems for test purpose, he didn’t ask me to buy them again, maybe he was a little embarrassed. Instead, he asked his other followers to buy them. Little did he think that none of them was willing to buy it and refused him with different excuses. Because all of them heard my miserable story and kept laughing at me for being so stupid to use private money to buy things for the company. They even gave me a nickname ‘idiot’.

    Since all of them refused to buy, my director had to ask me to buy them. I promised him without hesitation and the laughter of mock was around me. I had to said to them, “it’s not a big deal. My money comes from our company. I do a little favor to our company, which is what I should do.” So my nickname was changed from ‘idiot’ into ‘millionaire’.

    In fact, I thought my director wasn’t an idiot, there was no reason for him to not know I paid all of them. These were my perfect opportunities to please my director, because I wasn’t a good bootlicker at ordinary times. He was the person in charge of my destiny in the company, it wasn’t a big deal for me spending a little money to please him. Thinking of colleagues under my director, I just thought of Cao Cao’s review on Yuan Shao, “…doing great things with the fear of death, seeing profit as small as fly without remembering life…”

    Last week, my director repaid me and even gave me a raise for a third time, usually there were only two raises in a year. I never expected those things to happen and only wanted to please my director originally, however, they did give me extra pleasure.