Cackle at Little Sheckles

Laughter is considered the best form of medicine. Not that it makes bad things go away or the problems just vanish but for the fact it allows us to ignore it. Hence why most comedians deal with their life issues by making jokes about it. I mean, making money off of my won problems sounds really nice. Back to the issues at hand, and the reason for this blog.

Senior year was coming and I didn’t know what I was going to do for my capstone project. I originally was going to do it for accounting job shadows, but there were multiple issues with that so I switched my choice. I was going to build a computer. I don’t know if you know about computers but they get quite expensive really fast. At first, I was planning for a budget of about a thousand dollars. I needed a lot of money for it then. To make this money I worked at Bates college over the summer. Well, considering I made pretty good money, then I also wanted a car to be able to drive to a new job when the season was done and hang out with friends to increase my sanity through the year.

The car started to turn into a money pit as most cars do, it was also two thousand dollars by itself. Spending most of my summer money on making sure it was running properly caused a hole to be burned in my wallet and money was just leaving, but not going into my wallet as fast. With only having little money left from my summer job, I decided to sell the gaming laptop that I had that was becoming obsolete considering it was 3 years old and didn’t have a charger since it had just broken recently. Originally a thousand-dollar laptop, I decided to sell it for around $500-$600 to at least pay for half of my new desktop computer. A lot of people asked about it where I was selling it, asking for the amount I wanted.

Being still young I made a big mistake. Instead of selling it on the website, I thought I was helping someone by sending it to them, but I was actually just playing myself. A 3rd party sent me an email from what I thought was the United States Postal Service. It definitely was not from them. It told me to that after I sent the code to track the package it would send me another code for the money. I didn’t even think twice about it, except I thought it was weird that they didn’t go through the website. The code they sent me wouldn’t actually work and I was beginning to think it was a scam. So I called the USPS division for pay codes and told it to them. Of course, they said it wasn’t a real code and I knew I had been swindled.

I was upset at myself at first for being so easily tricked, but instead, all I could do is laugh at myself. I had to laugh and feel better about it because I knew what was coming. I knew the next couple of months until roughly December would be difficult when it came to my finances. I had very little play money and instead had to spend most of my money on one of two things, my vehicle that is still racking up payment and my computer. This meant having to put off buying fun things or going out to the movies or get food with friends or family unless they were kind enough to bring me. As more time went on with my new job, I realized I wasn’t going to make enough money to have my car stickered by November and have my computer built and running by January, so I got a second job. This was honestly a really good thing for me even if it was stressful. I learned how to deal with stressful situations and what it means to be dedicated. I still laugh at the scenario today though because it is really funny to me to think I got duped out of so much money and got life lessons from it. Plus now I have a legal working car and a $1400 computer that works quite well, so that’s always a bonus.

Photo on Foter.com