It was fun trying to sell goods and services.

The stall I was helping to manage for Viva worldcup was a stall selling iced fruit dessert and an ice breaking challenge. I was very enthusiastic about the ice breaking challenge. Here's what the challenge is about: The organisers have frozen tissue paper in ice, and the ice is supposed to become very very hard to break. So the participants can try to break the ice with a hammer in 4 hits. If they manage to do so, they get free dessert. If they can't, they pay $1. Simple? If the ice is very hard to break, the marginal cost of the service is almost nil. And considering that it is a sports event, you can expect lots of sportspeople with swollen ego to test their strength.

Indeed. When the lady boss asked the announcer to advertise for us, 10 seconds later there were about 9 muscular people + female canoeists trying out the challenge. The sad thing is... the ice didn't freeze properly, and it was so easy to break! I thought this would be so profitable and fun to watch.

It was not because we didn't test it out. I did test out to see if it works. When I did it, it took me 200 hits to break the piece of ice. You could say I'm weak, but the fact remains that I broke 2 bricks into 8 pieces of stone and lots of sand in trying to break the piece of ice. The piece of ice I tested with was frozen with a normal freezer for 20 hours. The ones we offered for challenge was frozen in an old freezer for 15 hours and placed in a cooler box for 3 hours. Not very good. But overall the dessert stall + ice breaking stall didn't make a loss.

Later we ran out of fruits, so we tried out some ideas. We blended syrup with ice, and it was really good! And it is so much cheaper and easier to make. We played around with the concentration and composition of the syrup, and we sold one of them. We made that out of all the remaining ice, and it was so nice we bought them ourselves. And then we closed shop. Not very profitable, but at least we all had fun, we learned from this experience, and we have a better idea of how to set up a stall next time. And we all had CIP hours.

After that, when all the shops were closed, the remaining stock were free for all! Play table soccer for free! Cookies and brownies and cakes and tarts all for free! w00t! Damn if I didn't have to go home for dinner I would probably stay there for 2 more hours or something.