SFR 5: High School - To Kick Me, Or Not To Kick Me (true story)

Hey you guys. I am actually excited to share this story with you guys. This is a personal story. This is something that happened to me and I'm laughing because I'm looking back at it, thinking how crazy it was. I grew up in Littleton, Colorado and I loved it. I had a fantastic childhood. I look back at all the crap that I did growing up and it's just fun. I had a really awesome child. I had awesome friends and grew up in a cool neighborhood with tons of other kids on the street. You know there was like two kids in every house on our street for the longest time. It was kinda fun because at night, I feel like everybody came out and the street became alive which is good and bad for various reasons.

Growing up, I went to this high school called Chatfield High School. I go and my brother and I were always trying to find stuff to sell to other people. I think it started because we grew up on the back nine of a public golf course. It wasn't like crazy nice or anything, but it was kinda cool because we'd go sneak on there, run from the golf rangers. We'd have our backpacks on, but the top open, and we'd have our swimsuits on, and we'd go jump in this pond. There's tons of them, it's a golf course. We'd go riding our bikes through this golf course on the paths and everything or just straight down the fairway just collecting golf balls. Then, we'd clean them up and we'd go sell them back to the golfers. I think that started us on this, I don't know, downward spiral.

One day, we got out of high school, and my brother and I we're pretty close in age so we were usually in the same school buildings. We get out and we're like "Hey, let's go over to- there's a Walgreens nearby." There's a Walgreens over there and its not far away. It was not uncommon for us to take like huge detours before we'd go home just for fun, just doing whatever. I don't know at that time that I'd necessarily call myself book smart, at all. I think I barely graduated high school like literally. I know some people say that figuratively, but I think I actually literally barely graduated. I had straight D's for a very long time in all the major course subjects. I guess you could say I was "street-smart" or whatever that is.

We go over to this Walgreens and we're looking at this toy aisle, which is the coolest aisle. You always go to the toy aisle when you're a kid, you know, even when you're an adult. I go over to the toy aisle and we're looking in there and we're like "What can we get?" We only had a couple bucks on us. We started looking around. We didn't even know what we were looking for. All the sudden, something catches our eye, and it's this little tiny ... It was kind of shiny, actually, but it's these pens, like writing pens.

They're in these awesome cases, like plastic cases to make them look really nice. Some of you will probably know what I'm talking about. There's two buttons on the side. It was a nice chrome pen and it's like one of those twist pens and on the side, there's two buttons. The top button makes this blue light come out the top. It was really cool. The bottom button shined a laser pointer out of the top of this pen and we're like "Holy crap, that's so cool!" We love that stuff. So we're like "This is awesome." We look at the price and you could get two of them for five dollars. We're like "What, this is ridiculous!" We each had like 20 bucks on us. We bought all the pens that I think that they had. We're like "I think we can go sell these," so we grabbed our pens, there was dollars in our eyes, we were thinking all about it.

We get back and my mom had this labeler and so we went and we were making these labels that are like "eight dollars", "twelve bucks," I mean like huge mark-ups from what they currently were. We marked all these things up and as a big fan of cargo shorts back then for their "utility and comfort," we loaded up our cargo shorts full of these pens in these nice looking cases. We'd taken off the original price tags for 2.50 and put on like 12 bucks. We go to school the next day and those were always the days I was excited to go to school.

I didn't necessarily love school. I liked it for all the extracurricular stuff that was going on there. I was a bit of a geek for sure. I was one of the head editors for yearbook and for computer stuff, go figure, not writing or taking pictures and stuff like that, but for layout and stuff like that. I was in choir and theater and stuff like that, but I did awful in all the other subjects. The days where we were trying to take over the world and sell stuff to people, those were fun days.

We go to school and we start showing these pens in our classes. We're like "Hey, check it out," almost like we're doing a drug deal. It's funny to talk about it now. I never really thought about that, but it must've looked bad. I was like "Dude I got this sweet pen, do you want it man?" It was totally the drug dealer clothes. We'd play with them for a second and someone would be like "Oh, that's totally legit man! Can I have that pen?!" We're like "It'll cost you 12 bucks, I don't want to lose money on it." It showed 12 dollars on the price tag and they're like "Dude, I'll totally buy that from you!" We're like "Okay," you know? What's crazy is at the end of that day, we had sold all of the pens in a matter of like 20 minutes individually in our classes in one class period. We were like "Oh my gosh, we're going to be rich!"

We went straight back to that Walgreens, used all the money we got, bought more pens, which I'm glad they restocked and such, and went back, used the labeler, and the next day, we were loaded up with more pens. We sold all those pens in like a matter of hours, not even another class period. We go back and forth and we're doing this several times and we're making crazy margins on this thing. We're like "These pens are so under-priced, this is ridiculous!" We're selling these things to people for even like 15 dollars, 20 dollars, and they're two and a half bucks! We were making a killing on these things. We just kept going back, taking all the money we were making and dumping it straight back into our product.

It's funny because looking back on it, people were buying from us, turning around and selling again. We had our own freaking distribution channel starting! It was nuts. It kind of got out of control. It got to the point where people, I don't know how they heard about what ... I guess it was pretty easy to see and hear about us. You'd walk into the commons and there was all these red dots all over the walls, like I didn't grow up in a small high school. There was like 3,000- no, what was it? It was about 2,300 people in our school. It wasn't small. We had been pumping in tons and tons of these pens in there. Like I said, it got to this point where people were like interrupting us in the middle of a class. They seriously would open up the door in the middle of my english class and they'd go "Uhh ..."- like the class would be going on. They'd be like "Uhh, are you the kid with all the pens," and I'd be like "Dude, come on! You're stupid, man. Get out of here," and then I'd be like "Uhh, yeah," he's like "Do you have any more of them?" I'm like "Yeah," like "I'll meet you- here, I'll just wait right outside when your class is over and I'll get them right there."

We had caused so much freaking desire for these pens. It was starting to get us in trouble. What is funny because one day, like I said, you can start to see all these red dots all over the place. One day, I was sitting in algebra class which I think I failed, well no, I got like a 60.1% in that class. That's what I got in most my classes. Math for sure, English for sure, because you had to read a whole lot, definitely got straight D's every single semester in Spanish, like mercy kills- 60.1%, barely passing these so I could move forward. I think they knew that I just wasn't a kid th...