#41. Spending that First Paycheck (Thursday, August 9, 2007)
What was your best day…of wasting money on something fun?
From everything I’ve written up to this point, you could probably come up with a fairly long (and colorful) list of adjectives to describe me. But out of all those adjectives, frugal should definitely not be one of them (#61).
And, as it were, this disturbing habit of way-too-easily parting with my money goes all the way back to my younger days. Namely, the first time I ever earned a salary.
That August, as part of the Shad Valley program (#56) the previous month, I got to do an internship at this place called Maplesoft in Waterloo that developed advanced mathematical software. This was back when the Blackberry was still a big thing, and the high-tech industry there was the place to be.
It was pretty awesome working in R&D there. As a high school student, I wasn’t really expected to do much. So I got assigned to check the command-completion templates – the feature where you type in a few letters and it gives you a drop-down list of functions along with placeholders for their arguments – in UNIX for the upcoming Maple 12 release.
The plan for me that month was to just fix a few typos and change the formatting slightly, which I finished in a week. And the guy who had hired me was in Hawaii, so nobody knew what to do with me. So the rest of the time, I was encouraged to reorganize the placeholders and try to make them more intuitive, as well as improve the plot tutorials. (Almost none of what I did there made the final release; but, in fairness, I was only a high school student.)
Most importantly, though, I had some spending money for the first time. And during that summer there was only one thing on my mind: none other than Magic: The Gathering (#105, #88, #78, #66, #49). I had kind of stopped playing four years earlier in 2003 when they introduced this gimmicky new card face, but had recently gotten back into it thanks to the release of the even more gimmicky Time Spiral set of cards1.
With all my cards back in Ottawa, I had a strong urge to find a store that carried them in Waterloo. And flipping through the Yellow Pages, I found this place nearby called J&J Cards and Collectibles (#105) that did. Sounded promising.
So on that Thursday evening, I made the thirty-minute walk down University Avenue to check it out.
That place turned out to be massive. It had a small door at the front, but inside was literally a gaming superstore, with aisles and aisles of board games, comic books, kid’s toys, etc. And near the front they had a whole section for buying Magic cards. I was in heaven.
Prior to this, I had to rely on either my parents or my meager savings to buy one or two packs of Magic cards at a time. But now, here I was, standing in front of multiple binders and display cases full of powerful individual cards that I could just buy on the spot. Buy, and bring back to my bedroom on the Waterloo campus to play with, without the least bit of guilt or judgment.
So, I dare say I went a little overboard. Just pulling out every cool one- to five-dollar card as I saw them and adding them to my pile, while temporarily forgetting everything I knew about math and adding things up. I spent about $150 that day. Then came back again the week after to spend even more.
It probably would’ve been among the greatest few weeks of my life, if not for the rather sharp (unrelated) downhill slide I went on in the three years following that summer. But still, for the thirteen years that followed, I don’t think there was any other avenue where I could’ve spent that amount of money and obtained anywhere near the amount of excitement I did then. And for that reason, it was worth it.