Jan 24
The Potential Story
Originally told here.
Life is randomness. Why do I say that? Because a lot of the weird stuff that’s happened to me in the last year happened because I didn’t click a button.
Some day in mid-September I was sitting in front of my computer, killing time between math class and picking up my roommate. I was driving them around because their truck was in the shop. I see a thread about ‘parody motivational posters’ - if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I thought, Despair should be pretty damn flattered right now. I threw this together in about five minutes:
I throw it in the thread and leave, and when I come back I notice that a few people thought it was really funny. Cool. It ends up getting posted to a Photoshop Phriday. That’s the second time I got posted in a Photoshop Phriday and frankly I’ve gotta admit that it turns your crank a little to get posted on a site that has several million pageviews a week.
A couple weeks later I get this e-mail with a subject of ‘inquiry’. I think “Hell, spam-assassin’s flakin’ again,” and almost delete it. For whatever reason, I pop it open and read it and damn near shit myself. It took me a few minutes of reading headers to prove to myself that it wasn’t spoofed. Turns out that somebody from Despair reads SA, saw the PsP and liked my design. Liked it so much, in fact, that they wanted to pay me $500 for it.
They didn’t have any way to contact me so they offered Lowtax a $250 finder’s fee to pass their offer along to me. He gave them my e-mail address and instructed them to give me the finders fee too. if you ever want to know why the man’s inspired cult status among the forumgoers, that should cover it.
I respond with:
“As a poor college student, I’d have to say that I accept your offer. No, that wouldn’t be accurate. Or rather, not to put too fine a point on it, I would trip over my own feet running helter-skelter to the mailbox to get the envelope containing the forms to accept your offer. So YES, I absolutely unequivocally except your offer, and I eagerly await whatever forms I need to sign.”
The mock-up from Despair. It’s quite awesome.
They promise to send me a bunch of merchandise as well, I tell them to send it to Taylor Street because I don’t want to deal with it during the semester. After my last test I haul ass home for Thanksgiving break. By the time I get home I’m punchy as hell, strung out on the remnants of Amp and energy bars and looking for something to do. I rip open the box from Despair and decide I want to know how much floor space 20 lithographs cover.
I start ripping lithos out of the box and putting them on the floor, over the couch, hanging off my chair, etc. It’s fun and I’m tired. Suddenly my caffeine-addled brain clicks in and I realize that I’ve already got 20 posters on the floor and there’s a lot more in the box.
They were supposed to send me 20 lithographs and 100 notecards. They sent me 120 lithographs.
After debating covering the whole ceiling in my computer room with ‘Potential’ lithos, I drop my Despair contact an e-mail. He responds incredulously, telling me that they rarely have shipping problems and that mine is a first. On top of that, he tells me that he’ll send me out the 100 notecards that I should have, and that I can keep the lithographs.
So at present, I’ve given away a bunch to Muscovites and Pullmanites and friends in TF, and I’ve still got a fuckload of them left. I’m gonna put some up on SA now that my life is vaguely stable (for the moment.) Then I don’t know what I’ll do. Ebay, maybe.
Or maybe I’ll wallpaper my house.