Re: Apartment: Mingmei & Donna
Indoctrinated was a great word. Donna nodded emphatically, understanding more of what she meant with that one word than any questions Donna may have asked. After all, if there was one thing that Americans had been pummeled with since the Cold War, it was that Communism is bad. Donna never really saw the big deal, because it's not a terrible idea in theory, but people were always at fault for the failures of their ideologies. People were bad, not their politics. Well... politics is a whole different can of worms. "What was your first big 'This is Western' thing that you experienced back home? Obviously coming to the US would be a pretty big one."
"... I know I don't have to offer." Maybe she should have waited, but Donna wasn't exactly a business master. She didn't feel the need to negotiate. That was what she was going to pay any other person that would help her code. It only seemed fair. "I suppose I don't really get bargaining. I never worked in the business or legal offices at my old job. I do know it wouldn't feel right to pay you less." Donna listened to Mingmei explain what her sister did, and she tilted her head for a moment. It sounded like one of those places that dealt with money. You know the ones. The ones that didn't have products. Just money back and forth, all day, every day. It was far more interesting in Donna's mind, because international business economics was not something she ever thought she'd have to think twice about. Ever. She had little idea what Mingmei's sister did, but now in Donna's head, it was all very super spy movie. "You also studied International Business, right?"
Donna wasn't paying any mind to the food in the water, her attention instead concentrated on the countdown of the microwave timer. She stopped the timer the second before it went off, and as is tradition when using tongs, clicked them together twice in the air. Was it making sure they worked? Maybe a kitchen battle cry? Who knew the reasoning, but what fact stood as ancient as time began is that you had to click those tongs together before you used them. With each dumpling she pulled from the water, "Jiao-zu." Plopped onto the plate, and the fishing began once again. "Jiao-zu. Jiao-zu." Practice makes perfect, right?
Writing she understood, as sometimes she could only manage to piece together certain issues with code when she wrote it out on a whiteboard. Sometimes it helped, but more often that not Donna had forgotten a comma somewhere. Not a huge problem when the code was short, yet in tens of thousands of lines of code one missing comma was hard to find and broke everything. That was the cause of the Mental Breakdown of 2011. Donna maybe should have been worried about someone she didn't know sitting in front of her computer, looking at her code, taking notes. She wasn't. It was one of her flaws. As Donna wouldn't even consider stealing someone else's work, she was equally as oblivious to if someone was trying to take advantage of her. She was happy to share with someone that seemed to understand what was happening as well as she did. "Is the DDoS still going on Shadow, or has it finally broken through to the brute force entry?"