Prelude to $20,000, or how to rip the ear off a man.

I mentioned once that I managed to win a game of fiscal chicken with an evil company once to the tune of $20,000. Well I'll be telling you that story soon, but for now allow me to give you some back story.

"Wonder what Google Image Search willohmygod..."

High school was coming to a close, I had chosen my college from my list of possibilities and was now beginning to learn some of those life lessons about growing up people always threatened me with. I needed to pay for this education, and this being America, that meant getting a bank to pay it for me and then living under an oppressive shadow of debt until the day I die in some gutter. The second lesson came soon after, no one will loan to some kid without a co-signer, and my family has abyssal credit and assets. So, some broke kid with a poor family now needed someone to co-sign on a loan, things didn't look good. 

My father was a foreman for a construction company at the time, stone work on bridges mostly, and was pretty close with the shifty folks who owned the company. I had fixed the dust-bins they call computers before, and so I had a vague idea on who they were. One guy was pretty docile, he was the face of the business. Polite, relatively intelligent, and clean cut. I met with him first when I arrived to ask for a co-signer. The conversation was pleasant enough, talked about college as an opportunity and a chance to grow as a person and all that, he encouraged me to make the most of it. Somewhere in the middle of it, just as I was relaxing and thinking this would all work out fine, the intercom crackles and someone screams to, "SEND 'EM IN!" So I walked into the second owners office, the older brother of the first man.

Anthony, I remember his name, and he is a very different beast from his brother. I walk from the warmly lit and pleasant atmosphere of one office into the bare and dark office of the other. The room is completely bare save for a desk covered in some kind of dust or powder, and piles of stone randomly distributed about the room. Anthony noisily wipes at some powder on his nose and yells for me to sit down. He then locks eye contact with me and begins shouting.

Yeah, this is roughly what I remember walking into.

I want you to imagine a man with bloodshot eyes and what you can only assume is cocaine covering his desk and nose shouting at you. The whole time he is unblinking, and he never breaks eye contact. Time for the caps-lock key! "YOU ARE GOING TO COLLEGE UNDER MY GOOD GRACES! THIS ISN'T ABOUT FUN, THIS IS ABOUT BUSINESS. WHAT THIS IS, IS AN INVESTMENT. AN INVESTMENT OF MY MONEY, MONEY I EXPECT TO SEE RETURNED TO ME. YOU ARE GOING TO SCHOOL TO LEARN BUSINESS SO YOU CAN GET A JOB IN BUSINESS AND MAKE MONEY SO I CAN GET MY MONEY BACK BECAUSE THIS IS AN INVESTMENT OF MY MONEY SO DON'T THINK THIS IS ABOUT PARTYING OR FUN OR ANYTHING OTHER THEN..." 

The door suddenly opened at this point, no knocking or anything, and for a second I foolishly thought the nightmare was going to end. Instead a large man strides in with a huge grin on his face to announce, "Great news! They reattached Bobby's ear!" and just strolls back out again. Leaving me abandoned. Without ever breaking eye contact Anthony continues. "IF YOU EVER GET INTO A FIGHT IN A BAR OR IN THE STREET OR WHEREVER AND YOU NEED THE FIGHT TO STOP, YOU GRAB THE MANS EAR AND PULL DOWN HARD AND FAST. THE EAR COMES OFF AND THE FIGHT STOPS, THEY CAN REATTACH THE EAR LATER AND THIS IS AN INVESTMENT! AN INVESTMENT OF MY MONEY!"

A roughly to scale model of conflict resolution.

Eventually he trailed off and let me finally leave his office, the whole while all I could think about were severed ears. Papers got signed and I left as quickly as I possibly could, and slowly learned more about the people I was now legally and financially bound to. Now none of this was ever anything I knew for sure, but rather from overhearing things my family talked about and being around that office from time to time. The impression I got was that these people, and the company, were not the most honest or legal of operations. Shady dealings, corners cut, associations with criminals, and a very short amount of loyalty, but they always seemed to like my dad, so I never really worried much about it. Until the accident, that is.

Tomorrow I'll tell you about the accident that resulted in my father getting cybernetic implants, and the $20,000 revenge scheme I undertook. The cybernetic implants thing may be slight exaggeration, but not by much. Turn in tomorrow for the exciting second half!