LinkExchange Member
So, gather up your moxie and start typing. The world is waiting to learn of your Broke & Brilliant struggles. The only requirement is that your story must be true.
As is my generous nature, I have a story of my own to share:
I entered college courtesy of a partial academic scholarship to Virginia Tech. I drank, joined a fraternity and, several years later, managed to scrape up enough credits for my History and Political Science degrees.
I am not recounting the memorable highlights of my college career, mind you. I am, however, recounting all that I remember from those years! But, as we all know, it is not the degree that is important, but what you do with your life once you get out of school.
Knowing the importance of the last statement, I became a bartender upon graduation from college. The world was my oyster. I was paid to drink and fart to my heart's content. My farting made my customers weep with glee, while my drinking made me blissfully unaware. Oh, glory days!
Every day I would play my own private drinking game. I deemed it "Drink Your I.Q." I would match my functional I.Q. at any given moment with a drink that contained a corresponding proof of alcohol. Each night, my shift would start with a double Bacardi 151 Rum on the rocks (I am a tormented genius, after all) and it would typically end with a Zima. Oooh, the pain.
Being that it soon became time for the owners of the bar and me to part ways (I was fired due to a lack of toilet paper in the men's room - imagine, me neglecting wholesome bathroom hygiene - irony or a set-up? You be the judge.) I begrudgingly sought employment elsewhere.
Salvation, or so I thought, was found in a company that offered me an amazing transformation. After almost two full days of training and a pat on the back, I completed my metamorphosis from a bartender to a highly respected business professional. Wondrous.
I had, at my fingertips, the opportunity to earn tens, no, make that hundreds of thousands of dollars as a commission-only business broker. Looking back, I feel that were it not for me, I could have profited quite nicely in this job.
Even though I dedicated an insane amount of time to my job and I received almost no money in return, I learned several very important lessons from my experience. The most important of these lessons is: Never, ever, never, never, ever introduce a potential business client to my friends, Brett and Jerry.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the legend of Brett and Jerry, these two once pulled off the best scam ever. They started writing a newspaper column for Charleston's Free Time in which they claimed to be Bar Critics. Brett and Jerry pulled this scam off so well that they once went a year and a half without paying for a single beer in a Charleston bar. Pure Genius!
The first of many major disappointments in my business career began when I met Rob, a 28-year-old potential buyer of a rather large and expensive nightclub, for food and a few drinks at a local happy hour buffet.
After five or six hours of heavy drinking on Rob's American Express card, I realized that Jerry's band, The Piranhas, was playing at some Charleston-area hick bar. Rob and I travelled across town to witness the soulful renditions of "World of Pain" and "The Funk Ups" (original Piranhas tunes, mind you). I was so moved by these touching melodies that I was forced to alternately weep like a tot and dance like only I know how. I even got right up on stage sang my own lovely version of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." I was in my glory.
Brett was working the lights for The Piranhas and we all went over to his apartment after the bar closed. Oh, Lordy, if you have a weak stomach, you may want to skip directly to the last paragraph. You see, even back then, Brett was a mischievous little tyke. He had spent the entire day at Toys 'R' Us where he had bought an assortment of novelty candies.
Brett let everyone into his apartment, cleared some half-empty beers from the coffee table and, full aware of the implications, he handed Rob a (God, it pains me to even say it) fishy candy. There, it's done. Stop screaming.
Oh. Perhaps I need to explain exactly what was in this candy. Hidden within the hard butterscotch candy shell lay the lusty combination of fish food, fish lips, fish scales and fish eyes. Or, perhaps it was sea bass. No matter.
Not knowing what had transpired, I watched in amazement as Rob bit into the candy. From the looks of it, little fishy bits started swimming about his mouth. Rob ran to the kitchen sink in a desperate attempt to cleanse his mouth of the pernicious flavorings that he had happened upon.
I'll admit, it was quite an entertaining sight. Things picked up when Rob reached into Brett's refrigerator and guzzled the last of Brett's orange juice. Suspiciously, Brett's stern warning to check the expiration date on the bottle of O.J. came just as Rob put the empty bottle on the counter.
To say that Rob immediately yakked upon downing the six-month-old orange juice would be a misrepresentation of the facts. He managed to resist the urge to purge his body of all the evils that were consumed that evening for nearly four-and-a-half tension-packed minutes (Jerry timed it).
I still remember Rob's valiant attempts to retain the last shreds of dignity. The sweat upon Rob's forehead, the glassy eyes, the quivering lips and the pleas to God served only to delay the inevitable.
Rob was not a graceful puker. In fact, he became quite rude and abusive. For shame. We did, however, manage to toss his butt outside before he could cause any major damage to Brett's apartment.
While Rob was outside, retching in a very annoying and loud manner (just ask the neighbors), Brett, Jerry and I were shotgunning beers. Quite offhandedly, Brett inquired as to how much money my company and I would make if Rob were to consummate his purchase plans. When I told him that we expected to make thirty thousand dollars in commissions, Brett's only words were, "Oh, sorry man.
Less than two weeks after the fishy candy incident, the deal fell apart. The interceding years have transpired with nearly identical results each and every time that I thought that I was about to make money.
My experiences to date may well have left me with nothing more than material for my writings and stand-up gigs -- which would be fine, if I could ever figure out how to profit from my poverty, that is.
I don't know exactly when I will be able to reap the fruits of my Broke & Brilliant experiences. I do know, however, that if I ever give up, that day will never come.
Being really too brilliant to apply myself to something as pedestrian and mundane as the law, I now found myself broke as well. To rustle up beer money and maintain the illusion of industriousness essential to keep my parents from booting me, I toiled in a series of ignominious positions for peanuts, as is so often the lot of the broke and brilliant. One such position was as a verifier of insurance application information.
In order to be accepted for this vital position, I had to pass a spelling test that required knowledge of the correct spelling of such perennial toughies as "Chicago" and "asphalt". According to the supervisor, I was the first applicant to score 100%. Upon meeting my co-workers, I had no doubt she was correct.
The job consisted of using a free long distance line to verify information people had given on insurance applications, to make sure the agent didn't lie to the company just to get a commission. The best part was that there was no phone log, and hence no record of me spending hours on the phone with old college buddies and a girlfriend on the West Coast.
However, I did have to sign an agreement that allowed them to listen to my phone calls to make sure I was doing my job properly, or at all.
Oh, you think you know what's coming? No, it's much worse.
Picture this: My boss is in her office interviewing a potential employee. She says, "Let me have you listen to a call so you can get an idea of what we do here." She punches into my line just in time to hear my friend say, "Hey dude, I hear you got a new job!"
Me: "Yeah, it's a real no-brainer, but you do what you gotta do to make a little cash."
I heard a loud click just after that, but didn't think much about it until I was summoned to the boss's office a little later. Suffice it to say, I wasn't asked to sit down.
Days later I was ripping up perfectly good dress shirts as a quality assurance technician for J.C. Penney by day, and writing tortured entries in my journal by night.
Just another chapter in the life of the broke & brilliant.
Thanks for the story. But tell me... What is the meaning of it all? Where
are you now, my man?
-- Noonan
Yes, my tenure in the insurance verification field was awhile back. Shortly after that I was living in San Francisco, working in a cafe on Haight Street for $4.50 an hour off the books, Which believe me is a real head rush when most of your friends have now joined law firms and are deciding what color Lexus to get.
A few months later, following a lead from an ad in the Examinter, I was on a plane to Japan, lured by a promise of free room and board (and airfare) in exchange for teaching English. This promised to be interesting, since my only teaching experience consisted of teaching my dog to roll over.
The school had an "immersion" philosophy, which required us to live with the students. In the same room. Three students, 1 teacher, in a room just big enough to hold four bunk beds and four toothbrushes. This had a detrimental effect on the traditional teacher/student relationship. I mean, would you have felt the same way about your High School English teacher if you saw them every morning before breakfast, naked, farting and hung over?
Which is why it didn't work. It was the equivalent of officers mingling with enlisteds. We all became friends. Classes degenerated over the semester until we were buying beer and renting American movies, stopping them occasionally to quiz the students on what was happening in the movie. I walked in one night to see a guy teaching his students -- attentive college-agers, a couple of befuddled businessmen -- the basics of using a bong. Minus the actual bong, of course. He was drawing pictures on the board.
The school folded after a few semesters, there being absolutely no market for such a thing. I left after about 3 months though, for an English-language newspaper, and ended up working there for 5 years. There's a ton of material there, let me tell you.
I finally decided I didn't want to spend the rest of my life as a second-class citizen in Japan, so I took some time off & backpacked through Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Nepal, Burma, Thailand & bits of Europe. Came back to the States about this time last year.
Had a terrible time readjusting to life in the U.S. but am now working for a
paper on the East Coast as an editor, doing cheeseball page design and
listening to my co-workers talk for 30 minutes about whether the Yankees
trading player x for player y in 1975 was really a good deal. Still
reasonably broke, and somewhat brilliant. Lots of stories to tell & time to
do it, so now that I got both feet on the ground here in the States, I'll
take it out of its raw form & make it into something profitable.
Noonan
Broke & Brilliant, A Survival Guide
| The Broke & Brilliant Hotline |
Helpful Hints |
Random Thoughts |
| True Stories of the Broke & Brilliant |
Nifty Net Links |