By Casee Ng

If you’re not in year 11, you might have remembered last week’s college fair as a fun day where you ran around the school with your friends and played games on the school grounds you know and love. But for us Year 11s, we had a distinctly different experience working at the parking lot of the school. So let me take you on a journey through my experience of manning a stall during the college fair.

So let’s start with the most chaotic start to a morning I’ve ever experienced. I woke up at around 7 am - which felt like a crime because who even wakes up at 7 am on a Saturday? - I was sleeping over at a friend’s house because she lived near the school. We planned to get to school at around 8:30 am, but then we realized that the school wouldn’t even be open by then, so we decided to sleep in. Well, she did. I spent my whole morning speedrunning our stall’s packaging before she woke up an hour later. After about 20 minutes of us getting ready, we realized that we were about to miss the bus to the MTR station, so we picked up our stuff, barely put on our shoes, and bolted out the door. I was running with my hands full: I had my file full of packaging, my pencil case, my essentials, my octopus and my charger. But did I have anything to store these things in? Nope. I forgot to get a bag on my way out. Stupid move, I know.

So we ran onto the bus, out of breath and we relaxed a bit because we were still quite early.

But if you were taking notes reading this, then you would notice that I didn’t mention bringing my phone with me.

Yeah… I forgot my phone. The phone I was supposed to take pictures and document with. That phone.

We couldn’t really turn back and get it, ‘cause we were already on the bus on the way to school, and my friend’s groupmate texted her to meet up at 8:40, and it was already 8:35. So we just settled on asking my friend’s mom to bring it when she was going to pick her up. Oh well.

After getting off the bus (and dropping a whole bunch of stuff, -1000 aura moments, I know), we were already running late, and we didn’t want to inconvenience our group members anymore, so we took a taxi. Slight problem, the taxi driver dropped us off at Heng On village, not Heng On station. So again, we took off running.

After we finally got to school, my groupmates arrived, and then we went our separate ways. My boss found a nice spot away from the sun, which would let us look at everything that’s happening in our corner of the school, and we prepared to sell. After a while, all of my friends arrived and I immediately got roped into buying 3 cable organizers and spending basically all my money. Take some notes kids, bring like 500 dollars to the college fair if you wanna support your friends.

The people arrived gradually and by the time it was 12:00, people were swarming our little parking lot space looking for stuff to buy. Children crowded our stall asking their mothers to give them money for custom bracelets while the stall next to us had already sold out. I had been staying in that part of the school for about two hours at this point and was starving. I’d not been able to have any fun or collect any game stall stamps. I could feel myself getting more and more bored. My social battery was rapidly draining like my boss’s laptop, which was playing upbeat trending hits like Good Luck Babe and Apple. No offense to Charlie xcx, but I felt like I was going insane. Thank god it ran out and I had to charge it at Red Door. My friend from this morning’s adventure, who was also close to selling out, offered to take me to Mcdonalds, but I couldn’t since my shift wasn’t over yet. So she went to get my lunch while I was stuck babysitting some random 8 year old.

So… remember how I put my boss’s laptop at Red Door to charge? Yeah… turns out, Red Door closes at 1. So, when my boss got back from eating lunch at her house at 1:10, she was like “Where’s my laptop?” and I was like “At the Red Door?” And then I went over and checked and found the door locked shut. That’s when I started to panic. I asked a teacher to help me, nope. I asked a classmate that worked on Red Door, nope. I went to the front desk to ask for help, nope. I ended up having to ask another teacher who had to call a Red Door employee just for the guy to tell us the fire escape was open. So kids, remember, charge your laptops if you wanna play music when it's your turn to do MISI. And don't charge at the Red Door on the day, you're not supposed to do that.

My shift finally ended at 1:00pm, so after the whole laptop ordeal I just relaxed, hung out with my friends, laughed at their suffering, y’know, fun stuff. And, I actually got to watch some performances! Two of my friends had a performance at 2:15pm and it was an actual blast to watch! I can't show you the video because they would kill me, but I absolutely loved it. It was definitely a highlight of my day.

After the performance was over, me and my friend decided to go home together, since I already got all my stuff that I forgot to bring that morning, and we had a peaceful ride home on the MTR. So, in conclusion, even though my experience sounded really bad, I still enjoyed it. I felt a sense of community because even though we were suffering, we were suffering together. I relished in the rush of trying to sell the last two premade bracelets we had to all my friends and acquaintances at the lot we were in. I also learned how to attract customers, and I actually felt a bit more confident in my skin after this whole experience. So hey, maybe it wasn’t all that bad. (But still, never again.)