Time Mansour - Chapter 49



Only Noblemtl

Episode 49 I didn’t know at first

I got off the bus.

Sacheon? You really came from far away. It’s not Sichuan Province in China, but Sacheon City in Gyeongsangnam-do. To me, a country bumpkin from Seoul, even the name of the place is unfamiliar.

I got off at the intercity bus terminal and looked around. Without even looking at the bus stop, I immediately looked for a taxi. In Ansan, if I was unlucky, I had to wait for over 30 minutes at the bus stop. It was even worse here, so I didn’t think they would do it.

“Yes. It is a residential facility for the disabled.”

I leaned back against the leather seat in the back of the taxi. I sat down as if I was lying down. My eyes closed on their own. These days, I get sleepy whenever I get in a car. It’s not a long distance. I’ll get there soon. I pressed my eyelids and tried to wake up.

I yawn and look out the window. The sunlight is splattered across the window. My eyes keep closing because it is so dazzling. The quiet countryside scenery keeps getting brighter and darker.

While the darkness and light of the world were fighting each other, the taxi’s speed gradually slowed down as if it had reached its destination. There was large writing on the entrance to the facility.

-Hopeful residential facility for the disabled.

(Love. Hope. Sharing. Caring)

They say that although they are invisible, they all exist in this world. This is what the director, a devout Christian, always said.

Christian facilities have similar slogans. I paid with my card and stepped on the ground. Bam. As soon as the taxi door closed, the driver backed up and pulled out.

I came here without any plans. I don’t know what to do now. I wonder if he’s still here. He came without contacting me. When I quit my job, I was organizing my phone numbers, so I deleted the contact information of the activity assistant teacher who didn’t even matter to me. I had no way to contact him.

An old cement building. I glance at the stains on the exterior and go inside. A person who looks like an employee glances at me and then goes his way.

I was wandering around the building like that. I should ask if the assistant teacher was still here. While thinking that, I looked for a nice-looking employee.

“Is this Youngjun? Is that right? … What brings you all this way?”

I turned my head when I heard a familiar voice over my shoulder.

“Uh… Hello, teacher. I’m sorry for coming without contacting you.”

“No. It’s been a really long time. Please come this way.”

The teacher who was surprised to see me. She was my sister’s activity assistant when she was alive. She took care of my sister for almost 10 years. In other words, she is someone I have known for that long, but I don’t remember talking to her much.

It’s not that we had a particularly bad relationship. It’s just that I avoided my older sister, so I didn’t have many opportunities to run into the assistant teacher.

“That… my older sister… no. Well, I have something to ask you.”

“Yes? … I don’t know what happened, but why don’t you just call me? That’s why you came all the way here.”

He sits on the lounge chair and looks at me with a worried expression. He seems to wonder what is wrong with me coming from so far away without any contact.

The activity assistant teacher looked at me with a pitiful expression and waited for me to open my mouth.

How should I bring this up? I had so many questions to ask about my sister.

I recalled countless sentences on the bus ride here.

When I actually tried to speak.

I didn’t think of anything.

So without me knowing.

“Did your sister… resent me a lot?”

My true feelings came out.

**

“Ye-eun was a good girl. She laughed a lot. She played a lot. She ate a lot.”

“Maybe… it was like that.”

I sat down on the lounge chair and nodded. Honestly, I don’t remember very well. I just shook my head up and down.

“You don’t regret it, do you?”

“A little. No. Actually, a lot. I keep thinking that I should have done better.”

I’ll answer honestly. He was the one who saw me from the side. He was the one who knew better than anyone how indifferent I was to my sister.

“You did well enough. Youngjun did his best. Just look at this. These are people with families, but they can’t handle it. They send them all to facilities.”

He pauses for a moment, then points to the table with his finger.

“I hope you don’t mind too much. Ye-eun doesn’t hate her younger brother.”

“···”

“I’m not trying to comfort you. It’s just that it’s obvious. People like Ye-eun are more instinctive than most people. It’s obvious who they like and dislike.”

“Was that really the case? Honestly, I don’t know.”

“There’s no need to think too deeply about it. To Ye-eun, Young-jun was just a younger brother. Her only younger brother.”

Those words made my heart ache even more. I was sorry and sorry again. To my older sister, I was just a younger sister. But to me, my older sister was nothing. She was something that existed but was invisible, like the orphanage director’s habitual phrase.

“I didn’t even know about it, I lived my whole life ignoring it···”

“But you lived together. That in itself is amazing. CDD patients are institutionalized at a much higher rate than autism or intellectual disability patients. It’s the first time I’ve seen a case where a CDD patient is taken in by a sibling who isn’t even a parent.”

Really. This is unimaginable. The assistant teacher shakes his head from side to side.

**

My sister’s diagnosis was childhood disintegrative disorder.

This disease, called CDD, usually develops normally until the age of 3 to 9. After that, however, social, language, and physical functions all collapse. It gradually regresses over time, just like a dementia patient.

Nowadays, developmental disabilities are diagnosed separately as autism spectrum disorder and intellectual disability.

There are other classifications that are more detailed, such as borderline intellectual disability.

“At that time, we all lumped them together and called them mentally retarded.”

That’s why my mother didn’t know about my sister’s illness until she passed away.

So, he spent his whole life blaming himself for the fact that his once healthy child had gone crazy.

The year her husband died, her only daughter also became an orphan.

I changed my mind while stirring the briquettes with tongs.

Suddenly I heard that I was full.

Even though I didn’t eat much, my stomach kept getting bigger, and before I knew it, I was sticking out.

He stroked my cheek and made a joke that didn’t seem like a joke.

While reminiscing about past memories like that, I suddenly come to my senses again and ask the assistant teacher a few more questions about my sister’s room. I asked the questions in a subtle way.

“Ye-eun’s room? I don’t think there was anything special about it. Why?”

“No. I just go into that room and start thinking a lot.”

“That’s possible. It hasn’t even been a year yet. Time heals all wounds, so just wait. Don’t worry too much. Ye-eun never resented Young-jun. I can guarantee that.”

The assistant teacher emphasizes this once again.

I feel relieved. In reality, nothing has changed, but

I feel like a burden has been lifted from my mind with just a few words.

Maybe that’s what I wanted to hear.

Maybe that’s why I came all this way.

Thank you. Thank you very much. I bow my head to the teacher several times.

like that.

Stop it. I kept lowering my head until the assistant teacher grabbed my shoulder.

**

My sister’s room where time stops.

I decided to think of it as a gift my older sister gave me.

So from now on, I’m going to use the room of time more for myself.

For the first time, I put my hand on the doorknob for what I want.

After logging into the ticket site, I waited for the right time. I crouched down and stretched out my hand.

like that.

9:00

As soon as the hour struck, the door was quickly closed.

I park my car on the side of the road and rub the touchpad.

-Red Blue Spring Concert

I went to the sales page, selected a seat, and reached the payment button.

I pressed the payment completion button as soon as the door gap opened.

Time starts moving forward again.

Then check the numbers that appear on the laptop screen.

– My waiting number is 2123. There are currently many people online, so I am waiting. Please wait a moment and you will be connected to the reservation page.

“No. This is not right. Please don’t joke around.”

I grabbed my head.

That doesn’t make sense. In theory, no human could get a ticket faster than me.

In a state where time had stopped, I paid and opened the door again.

“But it’s in the 2000s?”

It is definitely a macro program. It has to be a macro. It has to be that way.

“Doesn’t anyone know how to program so they don’t use it? Seriously.”

To be fair, I just didn’t use macros to do ticketing.

Really.

We were trying to compete with each other in good faith.

“I have to buy another ticket?”

The results were disastrous.

The name of this director flashed through my mind.

“No. No.”

I shouldn’t have bad thoughts. I thought to myself as I was turning my head left and right.

At that moment.

-Can I call you Jeong? Can you analyze in-memory data grid products?

The phone’s LCD screen lit up.

Just then, I received a call from a customer.

**

Singapore. Taiwan. China. I don’t know exactly which country it is, but from the name alone, it seemed like it was Chinese.

-Jeong. The app is not well optimized for performance. It is not performing well. It seems to be a problem with the in-memory data grid product. I don’t know if it is due to insufficient license capacity or if it is a mistake on our part.

-What about the product? Where is the license from?

-Blackhard. Seven Boss Grid. I contacted you because I thought you had done something similar. Is it possible?

Seven Boss Grid, a product of rival Blackhard.

Of course, it was a product I had never tried before.

-It’s an urgent matter. If possible, please contact me as soon as possible.

Most of the customers who contact me are pressed for time.

If you contact the head office with technical questions, they will probably resolve it.

Unless there was a serious disability, it had to take a back seat to the priority.

The problem is that the emergency situation felt by headquarters engineers is different from the emergency situation felt by each branch office.

To give an extreme example, in a country like ours, even if the server goes down, if the elders above say it’s not a big deal, then it’s not a big deal.

On the other hand, even just changing the file name, if the bank president or the vice president… no, even the vice president-general was making a fuss to get it done by next week, it immediately became an urgent task.

It must have seemed absurd to the engineers at the headquarters. They were so busy that they kept asking questions that weren’t even important.

So, most of the inquiries I receive are about tasks that cannot be resolved due to time constraints.

If you have the time, engineers in Silicon Valley, the headquarters, will eventually solve the problem, even if it is not you.

‘Wait a minute. Now that I think about it, it doesn’t seem like much has changed since I was working at the company.’

At Whitesoft… No. At my previous company, I was always in charge of such urgent tasks. The product line and the work were not much different from then.

But there is one thing that is a little different.

-I’ll look into it and get back to you right away.

The point is that you can choose what you do. I closed the door and started measuring the size of the work I could do.

Blackhard’s Seven Boss Grid. This is a product I’ve never tried before.

In-memory grid. I’ve done this a lot, often by handing off work to the data team, but of course it was a White Soft product.

“I wish it were just a simple problem.”

Because you have to earn the ticket price.

I hope it’s not such a big deal.

I started tapping away at the keyboard.