A few days after the Chinese New Year, I received a text message from my old dog, asking me to go to his house for dinner.

Lao Gou is a male student at the same level as the champion student in our class, which is the kind of real student who can learn English by himself when the Chinese teacher is talking Chinese, and he can sleep when the math teacher is teaching mathematics, and wake up to give the teacher a problem with multiple solutions. It's just that he made a small mistake in the college entrance examination and didn't get a score against the sky, but it was more than enough to abuse us.

Before going, the old dog also specially instructed me to bring my notebook, and he wanted to organize a CS battle at his home, saying that he had made an appointment with all the male classmates.

The old dog's house is also in the countryside, not very far from Stella's house, and he usually plays together, so he also invited Stella. According to the request, I came to his house with my laptop, and Polo, Vic, Datou, Brother Xiang, and Wang Yan were all there. Seeing me arrive with my notebook, the old dog was very excited and hurriedly beckoned me to the battlefield he had arranged. On a round glass coffee table, four laptops are opened to form a cross, with a modem and a few network cables next to it. As a result, the old dog didn't help us connect the network for a long time, and we didn't even set up a local area network. After tossing for an hour, in the sound of the old dog and his father's urging for lunch, this anticipation of the war of the century had to be abandoned, and the big guys could only drink tea and chat in the living room and wait for dinner.

After everyone gossiped and chatted with each other, Stella said that she wholesaled a batch of Kong Ming lanterns, hoping to find a few people to help her sell them in the square on the day of the Lantern Festival. Every year during the Lantern Festival, the city government organizes activities to guess lantern riddles in the square, so there are a lot of people. Anyway, I started school very early, and I was idle at home, so I agreed.

At that time, my house was on the edge of the square, and after dinner on the day of the Lantern Festival, I hurried downstairs to find my "boss". In addition to me, Stella "hired" Vic. While everyone was still eating, we quickly picked a place to set up a stall, in addition to Kong Ming lanterns, we also mixed in to sell some small lanterns and small objects. Because there were not many people in the square at that time, only a few children bought a few from their parents at the beginning. Stella kept prices down on the principle of small profits and quick turnover, attracting customers from the nearby stalls.

Later, with the official start of the lantern riddle guessing activity, there were more and more people in the square, and our customers also increased. We are not the only ones selling Kong Ming lanterns, so the result of homogeneous competition is a price war. Stella and I took turns acting as "commercial spies" to constantly weave from vendor to vendor to get the latest prices. Stella draws profits to the lowest and lowest prices according to costs to attract popularity.

However, this kind of vicious competition is, after all, a practice of hurting the enemy by 1,000 and harming 800 ourselves, and it is very easy to turn our overnight labor into "vain labor," and we need to think of a better way as soon as possible. Looking at the colorful Kong Ming lanterns in front of me, I thought of the means of selling river lanterns in Xitang, so I made this suggestion to the "boss". The boss is the boss, make a decision at the right time, and adopt it immediately. I don't know where Stella got the pen and paper, but I wrote the symbolism of various colors from memory, and then we followed the prompts on the paper and shouted for it. There are more and more Kong Ming lanterns floating in the sky, and more and more people come to buy in front of our stall. During this time, we also met a lot of acquaintances, and I also met several classmates. When Stella saw that I met an acquaintance, she would take a Kong Ming lantern and let me give it away, which gave me enough face.

Out of a keen sense of business, as the stock is getting smaller and smaller, many of the other small vendors next to it have cleared their stocks, and the number of customers is increasing. Stella took advantage of the situation and raised the price to the original plan, thus offsetting the loss of low profits at the beginning. Even so, the stock we have in hand sells out quickly. After almost twenty minutes of madness, our Kong Ming lanterns were sold out. Stella was very happy with this and gave us the small items that were not sold. She was delicate and deliberately left a box for the three of us.

We went to the city wall, turned on the folded Kong Ming lantern, and wrote on it what we wanted to say the most. Vic and I held the Kong Ming lantern to keep it cylindrical, while Stella lit the alcohol block at the bottom. We carefully adjusted the angle to prevent the lamp in front of us from becoming a fireball due to uneven heating. The heat slowly filled the cylinder, and finally it had a desire to fly, and we let go. In the night sky, the yellow flames are particularly bright against the white paper. Other Kong Ming lanterns also rose around the city, and the small city was covered by Kong Ming lanterns, each of which carried people's expectations for a better new year. Looking at the shocking scene in front of me, I couldn't help but sigh: life is so beautiful!

However, later because of potential safety hazards, some Kong Ming lanterns even caused fires, so Kong Ming lanterns were banned, and we can be regarded as a lucky group of small vendors.

In order to reward Vic and me, Stella invited us to a late-night snack and paid us a "salary" based on the night's profits, which was considered to confirm our employment relationship.

Then came Valentine's Day, Stella consulted with me again, she thought that cartoon bouquets should be a good seasonal item, so she used the profits from the Lantern Festival to stock up, and hoped that I could continue to help on Valentine's Day. I have to admire Stella's business acumen, but this time her idea is a little ahead of her time. At that time, people in our fourth- and fifth-tier cities had not yet adapted to this kind of cartoon bouquet, and coupled with the impact of ordinary cheap roses, we had to sell them at a loss. Even so, Stella was going to pay us both of us when it was over, and we definitely couldn't ask for it. In the end, under all kinds of shirk, I took a bouquet of flowers for each of us to offset the "salary".

Well, Stella is a good classmate, a good girl, and a good boss!