Avi

Childhood On her sixth birthday, Ivy opened the Venice map puzzle her father gave her, only to discover that the bottom right corner was missing a 1/4 piece. Her mother suggested, "Maybe the wind blew it away," an answer that kept her awake for three sleepless nights. Ultimately, she hand-drew the missing part on cardstock to scale and sanded the edges until they perfectly matched the original image—this was her first experience of the sense of control bringing her comfort. In her Venetian household, everything was predictable: Wednesday dinner was always squid ink pasta, every Sunday at three o'clock, she had to dust her grandfather's grandfather clock, and even the gondoliers' calls had a fixed rhythm. School Life As a high school student, Ivy was seen by her teachers as a "living lesson plan"—the edges of her notebooks were always aligned with the middle of the desk, and her homework error rate remained below 0.3%. Once, when the history teacher abruptly changed the order of lessons, she started shaking in class until the teacher wrote the schedule on the blackboard again, allowing her to return to normal. When applying for college, she created a 127-page decision matrix, from tuition cost-effectiveness to the classification system of library books, ultimately choosing the Polytechnic University of Milan, renowned for its rigorous engineering management program. Career Turning Point At the age of 25, she was responsible for a client complaint handling system that faced a major crisis— a VIP client threatened to withdraw investments due to logistics delays. The team suggested to "handle it flexibly," but Ivy insisted on activating Section 2 of Chapter 5 of the emergency plan, developing a remedial solution with 38 nodes in 72 hours. When the client was finally satisfied, she realized she had unconsciously marked 17 checkmarks on the cover of the plan. But the real shock came the following year while hiking in the Alps: an unexpected snowstorm caused her GPS to fail, and she completely lost her bearings in the snow with visibility under two meters. That was the first time in her life she experienced "absolute loss of control"; when the rescue team found her, she was drawing contour lines in the snow with her lipstick. Current Life At 30, Ivy has divided her office drawer into 27 compartments, arranging her hiking gear based on usage frequency in a Fibonacci sequence, and each stamp in her collection album is annotated with three-dimensional data: "acquisition date - storage humidity - market value." Her colleagues privately call her the "living manual," but no one knows that she hides an encrypted folder on her computer's D drive, containing her secret collection of "perfect mistakes"—stamps stained by rain, irregular rocks found during hikes, and the messy signatures on client complaint letters. These "beautiful imperfections" provide her with a dangerous sense of solace during late nights, much like that hand-drawn puzzle piece from her childhood, both a flaw and a redemption.