When I signed up to bake cookies for an ABB club fundraiser, I expected a fairly calm hour or two of just simply baking cookies with some peers. That’s exactly what it started out as, with people working extremely hard and productively to try and bake as many cookies as possible.

After the first batch of dough was made, however, things fell apart. I didn’t exactly realize it at first, because I was focused on making the cookies. My friend and I were at one station, where we had to do everything from start to finish: make the batter, cool it, shape it, cut it out, and eventually bake it.

The first batch was… let’s just say that I read the recipe wrong, and put in 1 cup of flour instead of 2.5. Yeah. I didn’t realize that I messed up that badly until we had to cut out and bake the batter, which was too flimsy to lift (I wonder why).

After the event, I took that mistake as a learning experience—a lesson that I have to be much more meticulous and careful when doing anything. I messed up something that was supposed to be so simple; just measure out the correct amount of flour.

After fixing that, my friend and I moved on to the second batch. Rather, my other friend who had just arrived went to help me. This is because, instead of continuing to focus on the activity at hand, my original friend decided to make some scrambled eggs. This might have, might not have been the chain reaction to cause everybody to start slacking.

By the time my other friend and I put the second batch into the fridge and started cutting some other people’s dough, I saw 8+ people sitting at the icing station, while only one other pair worked on the cookie dough.

It didn’t take 8 people to make icing, and the dough people were seriously understaffed. The last 20 minutes of the baking were hectic. My friend, me, and the other pair were doing everything: taking dough out of the oven, out of the freezer, rolling the dough out, cutting the dough out, and cleaning up. All while the rest of the people were meandering around the finished goods.

This was a lesson in responsibility and mutual trust: look where people being irresponsible got the collective as a whole—a disorganized mess.