It’s the sixth grade. Somehow, I had come across a catalogue for the store they bought all the school store crap from. You know, the smelly erasers and dumb keychains that they sell for like a buck apiece. So I somehow got this catalogue, and little old entrepreneur me was like “I should buy something from this and sell it at school for an absurdly high price to gain basically pure profit.” As sixth graders do. So I bought two huge tubs full of these keychains called Jellybears. This is what they look like.
So I bought a metric fuckton of these assholes for about 20 cents a piece. I start selling them at school for a buck fifty. Like I said, pure profit. 6th grade me was brilliant. I broke even in like eight seconds of me whippin these bad boys out at school. Saying these are were a hit is an understatement. They were like a home run triple, or some other sports metaphor. People are buying this shit at lunch time, between classes. Shit, one girl even admitted to selling the ones she bought off me around her neighborhood for like five bucks. I was happy to be the middleman, but I digress. The point is, not only did I gain entrepreneurial skills, I also made a pretty penny. However, a month into my brilliant business, I get a call down to the office.
I had never been called to the office before. I was such a goody two-shoes you wouldn’t believe. This was in a school that boasted like two fights per week. The ratio of cops and administrators to students was like 1:3. And there were 1700 people at this school. That’s a whole lot of authority figures for a whole lot of miscreants and ne’er-do-wells. And here I was, reading large pretentious books and wearing polo shirts, with a gigantic backpack and in an advanced math class. I was, and still am, a lame weeny. Just wanted to put that in perspective.
Anyway, I was called down to the office that day. Literally shaking in the huge chair they had for me, facing down the terrifying vice-principal, she pulled out a Jellybear.
It was the DIVA one, if I’m not mistaken. I was then given a good lecture about how I’m not allowed to sell things on campus without explicit permission, yadda yadda, the whole spiel. Except I felt there was something fishy about the whole thing. Maybe it was how she held the Jellybear in her hand, perhaps it was the way she confiscated the rest of them.
After asking around with the intense gossip network of middle school, I discovered the real reason the administration confiscated the Jellybears.
They had reason to suspect I was filling them with vodka.
They had reason to suspect that I, the tiny, stupid haired, braces-clad sixth grader who played a tuba bigger than she was was the head of a sophisticated alcohol distributing cartel in which I punctured and drained the goop from cute keychains, refilled them with straight vodka with a syringe, sealed them off with no trace, and sold them around school.
I’m not sure if I’m flattered that they assumed me capable of that sort of espionage, or insulted that they thought me dumb enough to sell middle schoolers straight vodka for A BUCK FIFTY.
really who did they think i was i was in advanced math for petes sake.
so uh, hi everybody. op here. it’s been i’m pretty sure four years since i wrote this post, and about one since it’s gone viral. many thanks and all. but i was looking through my activity when i stumbled upon this enlightening and fascinating set of tags.
it occurred to me that i’m pretty sure nobody’s thought to question what my parents were doing while i was cavorting around my middle school black market ring? so i decided to clear a few things up. so i had an allowance of exactly two (2) dollars a week, which was earned by doing chores. i had had this allowance since like mid elementary school and a fake bank account that my parents managed (like they were the bankers, it was called kidsave or something you understand). so my brother spent this allowance mostly on video games or ice cream or whatever but i hoarded it like some sort of terrible goblin so by the time of this story i had, between that steady allowance and christmas money and birthday money and stuff like that, a good thousand to my name. funnily enough that you mention parents not trusting kids with that fucking absurd amount of money, because mine didn’t realize i had accumulated this much to that point and once this event went down they promptly stopped giving me an allowance, jesus christ kid, holy shit.
as for the second question. how did my parents not find out. well, two parts. one, they didn’t not find out. in fact, they were in on the whole thing. they encouraged it. this is exactly what i said to the administrator when she asked that exact question. did my parents know? yes, ma’am, they encourage it. this phrase is repeated like a mantra at adult parties whenever i tell this story. encourage. they liked that i was learning business smarts. they made me make like excel spreadsheets to track my profit versus loss, we did all the calculations to figure out exactly how much to charge them for, the whole shebang. my parents have always been slightly insane but the one thing they never did was patronize me. if my dream of the week was to create a monopoly on dumb keychains and drive the school store out of business, like hell they were gonna stop that.
and the uh.
and the second part.
i may have left a small detail out of my original post? see, when telling this story, i always make it out like i had no idea what i was doing was wrong or that i was some innocent venture capitalist just tryinta make a buck in this hard time of 6th actual grade or whatever, but that is not exactly the truth. i did in fact know that it was against the rules and i did in fact conveniently leave that fact out when presenting the idea to my parents. i also left that fact out (that i was essentially slytherin-ing my way through middle school) when running home the day i got caught, sobbing about oh, the injustice of it all, etcetera, etcetera.
so uh.
that’s how were ok
with that.
anyway please enjoy this unofficial part 2 of the jellybears saga that i have gifted to you. use it wisely. or something.
