On paper, this will sound like the ultimate dick move. It'll sound like me taking out my problems on the innocent meatheads that take metal shop. I'm not a passive aggressive person by nature, but I'm not above doing something like this, especially when I don't have any other options.
It all started with a wad of traffic tickets. I got the traffic tickets by doing something perfectly normal: hiking. Can. You. Imagine? Getting a wad of traffic tickets for hiking?! It makes absolutely zero sense. But, it happened to me. It was wrong, but it happened. I got traffic tickets for hiking. Eight of them, actually: Driving with no seat belt, driving with no license, driving while underage, no insurance, no lights, no mirrors, no plates, and no doors. Yes, really. No doors. I wasn't even in a car!
I could have easily fought them, too. After all, I wasn't written up by an officer; they caught me on a traffic camera. I could have argued that the camera was not functioning properly (since it's designed to catch cars running through red lights, not hikers sprinting across the crosswalk); and that the tickets were sent in error. Except, my dad told me that fighting the tickets was not an option. He didn't care why I got them, he made it very clear that we would not be fighting those tickets. I would pay them off, regardless of whether or not I deserved them. So that meant I was stuck with $600 in undeserved traffic tickets and my dad would not bail me out! Unbelievable. None of this was right! I was so upset, I cried myself to sleep that night.
The following morning at school, I had an idea: Mr. Mandelsson, the metal shop teacher, has been both losing his hearing and cracking down on swearing (and a lot of people think it's about time - the guys in metal shop swear like their lives depend on it). My plan was simple, like the guy that sits in front of me in last period Spanish. Unlike my friend from last period Spanish, the plan worked. My plan to get $600 in a reasonable amount of time: put a swear jar in the metal shop classroom. The fee for swearing was $1.00, with a 40% surcharge for swearing in a language other than English (because trust me, people will try that when faced with a swear jar). I figured that with that in place, I'd have enough money to pay the fine in about a week. The people in metal shop swear frequently, and (as I've mentioned), Mandelsson is going deaf; and consequently, has bit of a tendency to ding people for swearing when they really weren't. Now that I mention it, maybe that's the reason they swear for real so often.
However; a funny thing happened. Turns out, Mr. Mandelsson is losing a little more than his hearing. I think his eyesight is going down the tube, because he kept misreading the label on the swear jar that says "$1.00 charge for cursing" as "$100 charge for cursing" and charged accordingly. Well, to make a long story short, I had enough money to pay the fines by the end of the day.
And after that, the swear jar was gone. It vanished as quickly as it arrived. Nobody could figure out where it came from (typical metal shop students…too dumb to figure out I put it there!) I paid the traffic tickets, and went on with my life no more worse for wear (if not a little disgusted at the city for giving me traffic tickets for hiking.) Everything went back to normal right?
Wrong. This was the point where things were just started to go wacko. It's always when you think it's settling down, isn't it? Things always get out of hand the minute you think they're settling down. That said, my definition of out of control is a little different than everyone else's. When most people say something is out of control, they clearly haven't seen anything yet. Seriously, most people would have called it in after getting traffic tickets for hiking. I didn't register "out of control" until now.