Lena

Childhood Lena spent her childhood in a precision instrument factory on the outskirts of East Berlin, where her father worked as a quality inspector, and all items in the house were labeled with their locations and usage periods. On her 5th birthday, her mother was delayed 12 minutes returning home due to a supermarket queue, which postponed the birthday party originally set for 6:00 PM. Lena locked herself in the wardrobe until dawn, an event that became the starting point of her obsession with order. At the age of 9, she discovered a 0.3 millimeter error in the scale of the maps in her history textbook and wrote to the publisher requesting a correction. Three months later, she received a erratum statement bearing her name, allowing her to experience the joy of "order conquering chaos" for the first time. University Years After entering the Technical University of Berlin, Lena majored in Business Administration and minored in Psychology. In her sophomore year, she served as the project leader for the campus cultural festival. Due to team members arbitrarily changing the stage layout plan, the event exceeded its budget by 7.2%. This "out-of-control disaster" led her to cry all night in the dormitory bathroom, after which she spent three months creating a 127-page "Project Risk Prevention Manual," detailing everything down to the "relationship between the placement of coffee cups and work efficiency." The manual was unexpectedly discovered by a professor and recommended to a technology company, winning her an internship opportunity but also earning her the reputation among classmates as the "weirdo who measures social distances with a caliper." Career Development After entering a tech company as an operations specialist at the age of 25, Lena created the "Three-Dimensional Error Management Method": breaking down work content into a timeline (±5 minutes), quality axis (100% pass rate), and emotional axis (variation range ≤2 points). Her team won the "Zero Error Award" for 18 consecutive quarters, but employee turnover remained high—one employee wrote in their resignation letter: "I’d rather manage a bunch of cats than be asked every day to record what I had for lunch using mind maps." At the age of 28, the company CEO unexpectedly scrapped all attendance systems; Lena vomited in the meeting room and subsequently took two weeks of sick leave. During that time, she cycled a total of 867 kilometers and created 43 mind maps titled "Survival Guide for a Chaotic World." Current Dilemma At 29, Lena finds herself caught in a new "crisis of order": she has begun analyzing her dreams with mind maps, panicking when she has to take a detour while cycling due to sudden road repairs, and even silently crying in supermarkets at disorganized shelves. Last week, she encountered a mother with a baby on the subway; a tissue that the child had doodled on dropped at her feet. That chaotic yet vibrant doodle caused her to wake up three times in the middle of the night. Perhaps beneath her strict armor of order, the 9-year-old girl who refused to extinguish the "wrong" candles is quietly yearning for a daring adventure of chaos?