ROTC Days, How I earned

I had a piece about my ROTC inspired jacket and it brought back some memories. Despite the heat, the difficulty in waking up on a Sunday, the very long wait, the Alay Lakad, etc., it was not all bad. I had good times too and good earnings during my stint as ROTC salesboy. See why I ended up selling hopia to the Philippine Army reserves.

During the Hopia days, what I did was, I'll buy a plastic full of hopia outside the school stores. Once the master hopia officer gave us our 2 boxes each of hopia to sell. I'll remove the school sanctioned hopia, insert my own hopia and I'll sell my own. And by noon, I'll check back with the Hopia Master Sergeant and will report that I did not sell much. The thing was, I did sell a lot but I sold my hopias. I'll end the half day with earnings enough to buy cinema ticket. But man, business is risky. Couple of times I ended on a red and went home with about 50 hopias. How's that? Sometimes the command from higher ups allowed the the "lumpia" sellers from the inside to be embedded inside the troops. That's where the trouble came in. ROTC boys prefer the lumpiang fried toge with spicy dirty vinegar and pop cola over my hopia. Even I loved and love that toge lumpia, can not blame them. This one is nasty but another source of income involves chirping the lip of the empty, sold, pop cola bottle a bit and we said to our chiefs, that buyers were angry and decided to get back the money and refund.