Shanghai Tech Writer

NI Shanghai is located in Zhang Jiang Riverfront Harbor in Pudong. The office park is about 10 minutes taxi ride from Zhang Jiang Hi-Tech subway station. Many of the companies located in this office park are high-tech/IT-related companies such as AMD and Infosys.

NI leased two buildings for office space, building 43 and 45. I work in building 43, the R&D center. Building 45 is where HR, sales, marketing, customer engineer, application engineer, and the rest of the company are located. Building 44, the building in between 43 and 45, is another company which I don’t remember the name.

When I first started working, I asked a colleague why NI didn’t get the two adjacent buildings and the response was, “44 is an unlucky number.” I wasn’t sure if my colleague was joking or not because Chinese people can be very superstitious. The number 4, pronounced “si,” means death in Chinese. Chinese people don’t like that number or anything that sounds like death.

For example, you can’t give clocks as gifts to Chinese people because clock (时钟), pronounced shi zhong, sounds like death clock. You might as well tell that person you wish them to die.

Another example is buying phone numbers in China. Unlike in the U.S., different phone numbers have different prices. The easy-to-remember phone numbers—ones that have repeating numbers—are much higher priced, with the exception of phone numbers that have lots of 4’s. Those are the cheapest! I had an American friend who’s cell phone number had like five 4’s. He didn’t care. The phone number was free! On the other hand, the number 8, pronounced “ba” which faintly sounds like “fa,” means prosperity. The more 8’s in the phone number, the more expensive the number is. Many 5 star hotels in Shanghai have numbers like 6888-8888. I kid you not.

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