A Month of Bad Luck — But Please, Let the College Entrance Exam Results and Admission Letters Go Well
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Synopsis
The author shares a series of unfortunate events during their final high school exam preparation. After achieving their best exam result in the Shenzhen Second Mock Exam, bad luck struck. A printed score chart was lost, and a replacement arrived late. They bought a server from Hudiyun, which went bankrupt days later, costing 300 yuan. Their Digital Ocean student pack benefits were canceled, wasting another 100 yuan. They then purchased an Oracle Always Free plan, hoping it would last. After buying a new gaming laptop, they realized its poor battery life and planned to sell their Surface Pro 9 for an Arm-based model, but their mother discovered the tablet. With only tens of yuan left, an unexpected OpenCode GO subscription fee drained their funds, forcing them to borrow 5000 yuan from their mother. Additionally, the author suffers from severe allergies and high eye pressure at home, and their 91-year-old grandmother is hospitalized after a stroke. They hope for better luck with their final exam results and college admission.
A Month of Bad Luck — But Please, Let the College Entrance Exam Results and Admission Letters Go Well
I've found that writing posts on my own blog has its perks — it forces me to think more carefully about how events connect, and the margin-note feature of the Yohaku theme by developer Innei lets me summarize each post, add a more dialectical angle, or point toward deeper questions. That's been a huge help for my thinking and for turning those thoughts into new videos. Now, on to the main topic:
Let me start with the timeline: at the end of April, I took the Shenzhen second mock exam, the last city-level practice test before the gaokao. It wasn't because I did badly — on the contrary, it was the best result I'd had in the entire year leading up to the gaokao (and now that the real exam is over, I feel I did even better than that). I made it into the top five in my class, which is a solid result. But from the day those scores came out, it was as if I'd been cursed — one piece of bad luck after another.
First, the smaller stuff: 1) I made a score chart showing my current grades and my gaokao goal, and sent it to a Pinduoduo shop to have it printed. The first package arrived within a week, but I forgot to open it, and within a few hours my mom threw it out with the trash. I asked the seller to send a new one, but the customer service rep clearly never looked at my order history — they sent a blank board, and it shipped late, so it didn't arrive until two weeks later. I had no choice but to go to a local print shop and get one made for 15 yuan. Combined with the first two orders, that was about 30 yuan total, and by the time this final print came out, there were only a few weeks left until the gaokao… By the time I realized it, it was probably already useless.
Then, during the May Day holiday, I saw an ad for a discount on Hudy Cloud (狐蒂云) and bought a server without a second thought, for about 300 yuan. I'd used their virtual hosting back in middle school. Their prices were always dirt cheap — so cheap that I didn't quite trust them, which is why I'd never bought a server from them, only a few yuan-a-year hosting plans. I'd spent less than 10 yuan there in total. But since they'd been around for three years and never complained about costs, I decided to trust them and bought a server. Four days later, I saw an announcement on their site — yep, they'd run off. The owner owed 1.5 million yuan and only declared bankruptcy when he couldn't hold out any longer. Shenzhen police got involved, the court started liquidation, and 500 people filed joint lawsuits… A company that survived three years without a hitch — and the moment I buy in, it collapses.
And it didn't stop there. I'd been enjoying the DigitalOcean GitHub Student Pack discount — on the secondhand market (Xianyu), you can buy a student-pack-enabled account for about 100 yuan, which gives you a year of server time with a $200 credit. After the fox ran off, I quickly migrated my data over. I had two accounts with three machines, thinking that would last me half a year. A few days ago I bought another account and migrated my blog and the Misskey community over too. Then, just like that, DigitalOcean — which I'd been using with the student pack for two years — suddenly announced they were pulling out of the GitHub Student Pack program. All servers expire at the end of July. Three days, and another 100 yuan down the drain…
Yesterday morning, I bought an Oracle Always Free plan on Xianyu (registering yourself requires credit card verification, which I don't have). Honestly, there are no cheap servers left (Azure gets banned easily too, and opinions on Oracle are mixed — I'll give Oracle one last try since it's free forever; if that fails, Azure is my fallback). I didn't ask the seller to give me the account credentials — I only had them send me the connection details, and I wrote a script that automatically uploads backups to Qiniu Cloud object storage every 3 days. Hope it doesn't die on me!
After all this, I didn't have much money left, because I'd spent my savings on a new computer: the OMEN MAX (暗影精灵MAX). But I overlooked the battery life issue with gaming laptops. My previous Surface Pro 9 had a serious battery calibration problem (which I also bought brand new, for over 9,000 yuan), so I planned to sell the Pro 9 and switch to a Surface Pro X (2nd gen) — the ARM chip is genuinely power-efficient and can last 8 hours. How do I know? Because I installed Windows 11 on my Xiaomi Pad 5, and it barely heats up, lasts 8 hours, and runs smoother for daily use than my Pro 9. The best part? It only costs about 600 yuan on the secondhand market. (Unfortunately, my mom found out about it during gaokao week. Even though I basically only used it for note-taking at the library, I figured arguing with my mom was pointless, even if I had proof.)
So there I was, with only a few dozen yuan left in my wallet. I'd been hoping to hold out until the gaokao scores and admission letters came out, so I could get a refill afterward (please, please, please, Universe — let my score be high! Kamisama onegai shimasu!! Let me get into a good major!). But then — heh — I forgot to cancel the auto-renewal on my OpenCode GO subscription, and Alipay charged me 68 yuan (10 USD). Heh! I'm broke. I won't make it to score day!!!!
So I asked my mom for an advance of 5,000 yuan…
Okay, that was all about money. Now for the bigger stuff:
For me: coming back to Qingyuan has been really rough. Every time I'm at home, my rhinitis flares up, accompanied by high eye pressure, and my vision gets blurry. So every morning I have to go out for a walk or visit my grandma, and every afternoon I show up at Mixue Bingcheng on the dot for a Snow Cap Coffee, using my Surface Pro 9 to write blog posts and fix my website — until night falls and I endure the rhinitis assault in bed (tissues everywhere, a nose rubbed raw — the truest proof of rhinitis. A dab of Double Flyer balm helps for two minutes, then it's back. Nasal sprays and meds don't work either.) I can only turn off the AC, endure it for a while, and gradually feel a bit better… My mom comes in at night to turn the AC back on for me — that's really sweet of her. But in the morning, the mucus sits in my throat, my eye pressure is high, so I get a sore throat and blurry vision, and the rhinitis continues all morning…
For her: just two days before I came back to Qingyuan, my grandma had a stroke and was hospitalized. I can't write about it in detail yet. She's 91 now, with diabetes, and I don't know how she's doing. My parents said I don't need to go to the hospital to see her today — I can stay home or go out. I hope Grandma gets better soon.
I sincerely hope my luck turns around starting today — at the very least, I want the best of it reserved for the gaokao score release and the admission letter.
Thank you to every reader who made it this far. I appreciate it.
Wishing you all the best.