Chapter 107: The Final Moments of Slacking Off [Release 5]

Yang Tianqi and the others played three more rounds before reluctantly stopping, still wanting more.

"Alright, you all should get your minds back on track! The pre-sale is about to start," Chen Xujia said, putting down his phone and stretching his stiff neck. "Xiaoxiao, Tianqi, if any temporary tasks come from other departments later, you two review and divide them up. I’m heading to the command center."

As he spoke, Chen Xujia gathered his laptop, notebook, phone, and other belongings, calling out to Liao Yingying, who happened to be passing by, to join him.

"Hey Xiaoxiao, what’s this command center that Xujia just mentioned?"

"Command center? You’re interested?" Before Tang Xiao could answer, Su Zhenxin jumped in, "It’s nothing mysterious. Inside, there’s a big screen showing the overall sales situation."

Seeing Lin Luyou’s face full of yearning, practically stamped with the words “I want to go,” Su Zhenxin immediately dashed her hopes.

"But the main command center? Forget it. It’s usually sealed off, only opening during major promotions, and only people with level 6 or above clearance can enter. People like us at level 4 or 5, and you two who haven’t even been rated yet at level 0, that’s just a dream."

"Pfft, don’t listen to her nonsense," He Suozhen couldn’t help but interject. "If we can’t get into the main command center, there are still the regional command centers! Once the big sale officially starts, we’ll be sending people to stand duty there every day. You’ll have more than enough to watch then."

"Alright, alright, hurry up and... slack off! Once things get busy, you won’t even recognize yourselves!"

At Tang Xiao’s call, everyone hurried to squeeze in a little more playtime before work.

"Oh, by the way, because computing power will be focused on the main command center, the data you receive will be delayed," Cai Yuyao and Cheng Yulin suddenly remembered to mention this important detail before leaving.

"In other words, our official sale starts at ten, but the earliest I can send you current sales data and inventory status will be eleven."

"That slow?" Tang Xiao was dissatisfied. "Can’t you optimize the algorithm? Isn’t last year’s anniversary sale enough of a lesson? Getting data an hour late means by the time we finish analyzing, two hours have passed. Too many unpredictable factors in that gap."

"You telling me won’t help… We’ve raised this before, but the higher-ups won’t let us fix it ourselves. We don’t have the permissions or the technical resources," Cai Yuyao said helplessly. "You should talk to Daming and have him push this up the chain."

Tang Xiao nodded, then waved them off with a scornful expression, telling them to "get lost."

The incident they referred to was from last year’s anniversary sale. A home textiles supplier, aiming for greater exposure, had inflated their product inventory by adding two extra zeros before the event. Thanks to their seemingly ample stock, their product ratings soared, securing the highest level of traffic support at the time.

But once the sale began, customers, unaware of the true stock, flooded their store, and within half an hour, every product was sold out. However, because the system still showed available inventory, traffic to their products didn’t decrease.

It was Chen Xujia who finally spotted the abnormal inventory data during monitoring.

After manually taking down the products, the supplier messaged them:

Not only were their products sold out, but they were short by 5,000 units. Even with expedited orders placed with the factory that night, delivery would be delayed by more than a month and a half.