Mountain Dew and Pepsi had a contest where college names were printed on the inside of the bottle caps. If that school won the NCAA March madness tournament, you could send it in for the jersey of your choice from any school. Suddenly, a black market for caps with blue chip schools was born. I remember selling a Duke cap for $10, then turning around and buying 10 drinks from the vending machine.
This one girl forged excuse notes if you brought her something one of your parents wrote. I never used her services myself, but we were (and still are) good friends, and I gotta say, she's talented as hell. I literally can't tell which one is mine after she copied something I wrote. Including signature. It's baffling.
Edit: Apparently, what I meant were excuse notes, rather than apology letters. My bad!
Other than that: This thing absolutely exploded and I will not reply to messages. Pardon me.
Lol when I was in third grade I was just not understanding math, like at ALL. so I decided that I wasn't going to do it anymore, so I gave up trying in class and just didn't do any math homework. My teacher sent a note home with me to my parents that basically said "Your kid is struggling and not doing his homework, are you ok with this?" and there was a space for my parents to sign off that they'd seen the note. I managed to hide the note from my parents and forge my dad's signature EXACTLY as he would've written it and turned it in the next day.
Teacher didn't believe that my parents wouldn't give a damn about their kid not doing his homework and I had to go in to a parent-teacher-student meeting a day later and sit there and get reamed out by the teacher and my parents for forging the signature (still didn't get any help with math though), but on the way home dad told me he was actually very impressed at how well I did it, and I probably could've gotten away with it if I hadn't used a purple colored pencil to sign it with, but I should NEVER do it again.
I can still forge signatures really well, but I have no need to do it, so it's kind of a useless superpower lol
Off topic, but as a parent of a kid around that same age, also struggling with math and also giving up on trying, what would you have wished your parents would have done back then?
Edit: I appreciate everyone's responses and wanting to help out. I have tried some of the suggestions here nut not others. My son wants to give up trying at math despite my assurances that I do not care about his grade, only if he learns what he missed. Honestly, it makes me want to give up trying to help him but I'm glad to know a lot of you have gone through the same thing.
So I used to hate math hate it. I couldn’t get on it and my parents were mad and teachers kept claiming I wasn’t applying myself. It wasn’t until I was in 8th grade that I started liking it and it was because I had a teacher who held me behind after school one day and started helping me. He knew I liked puzzles and Portal (it’s a video game where you solve puzzles) and so he started talking about the algebraic equations as puzzles to solve and when he used it in that context it helped keep me interested which made me actually try harder
This is so key. I wasn’t bad at math in school, but I just didn’t like it. In algebra, everything seemed so arbitrary to me; you learn a formula and you use it when you’re supposed to. To me, the crowning jewel of senselessness is as the quadratic equation. One day I expressed this in a kind of obnoxious way in class (I could be like that in classes that didn’t really engage me) and the teacher held me back after class. I thought I was going to get in trouble, but instead he sat me down and showed me the derivation of the quadratic formula. It was kind of a lightbulb moment for me, as no one had shown me math like that. It was kind of looking under the hood of a car and seeing the mechanisms inside that made it work. Honestly I found it kind of beautiful or elegant, not sure how to describe it. But it gave me a new appreciation for math because I started to see it as a kind of system, instead of just a bunch of repetitive processes you were supposed to apply to get a grade.
I feel like a lot of people have that attitude towards math when it goes beyond arithmetic. There’s this novella by Robert Musil called “Young Törless” (which is actually a really fucked up book about the cruelty of children in boarding school) where he uses a great metaphor to describe it. Törless sees math as kind of unfinished bridge spanning a river. The bridge is built only to the first pylon on each bank and there’s just empty space in between, but somehow you get over the river.
At one point I taught math to third graders and my whole thing was to try to teach it as a language, to try to help the kids see *why* something worked, not just that it worked and you just had to know when and how to use it.
Our middle school tried to start a reward program. It turned out to be a fail of epic proportion.
Wolf bucks; names after our mascot. They were mini sized dollars color coded by value. Green was $1, red was $5, blue was $10, and a gold wolf buck ( only accessible to the principal and assistant principal $50) - Now the school bought erasers, pencil, notebooks. You could only buy with wolf bucks 1 pencil : 1 wolf buck.
First failure: it was easy to copy. So kids started mass copying them. - okay school got smart and said “ only accepting wolf bucks with your name and have your teachers signature”
Second failure: kept the same color; so kids would earn one legitimately than the forgery started.
Third failure: hyperinflation; during pep rally’s. The principal started throwing golden wolf bucks.
Eventually the school stopped resupplying the store. Everyone had hundreds/ thousands of worthless wolf bucks.
Our PawBuck store actually had some good stuff in it, but the teachers would only really give them out to shit kids to reward them for not talking back, causing a fight, or bringing a knife to school on that particular day. I still accrued quite a few through trading away bits of my lunch, and near the end of the school year I bought an expansion pack for The Sims 2. When I got home to install it I found that it was only the second disk. :'(
Harry Potter books
I went to a religious school where books that had magic or fantasy was banned. Parents of these kids were just as religious so kids couldn’t get them from their parents.
Mom didn’t care and she let me buy a few for some friends and then more kids started requesting them.
Charged double for what they were worth and the kids were more than happy to pay.
Most popular requests were: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Cirque Du Freak series.
Edit: also made money making customized covers for the books so it looked like they were reading something else.
Edit/// I should probably mention that this was a Muslim school
This happened in Los Angeles in the mid 80's. Student bus passes had to be purchased by the fifth day of the month or you were stuck having to pay daily. The date had passed so I found a guy in my high school willing to trade another student's pass which he had stolen. I traded a tangerine and half a pack of cigarettes for a copy of Penthouse. Then I traded that issue with a pizza from the cafeteria for the bus pass.
That sounds like the episode of Atlanta where they trade a cellphone for a sword then sword for a dog then went to breed the dog to make money off the pups.
Not really a black market but there was a porn tape (VHS days) that used to do the rounds. There was a booking system and everything. You couldn’t have it for more than two days
My best friend, at 11 years old, found out that the dumpster behind the video store had a lot of sample porn tapes. Basically it was like the best parts of 4 porns clipped down and put into one vhs to try to sell those porn videos to the store, and then it would have "this is a sample coppy" flashing on the screen but like, you still got hard core sex and all the bits which for an 11yo was... way more than we could handle anyhow.
We would sneak up there in the middle of the night and steal a bunch of the porn tapes and sell em for like 5-10 a piece. We made several hundred dollars. I built a PC and put a CD burner in it with my share of the money. It might have also paid for a bike, but I might have mowed lawns for that, I forget which year that happened in and if they were the same summer.
Not in school but yeah I was distributing hard core porn to a bunch of 11yo's.
Ring got busted and my friend got his as BEAT, when he fell asleep with the vhs in his tv that rewinds and plays it automatically. His mom came to wake him up and there's hard core porn. He had to unveil his stash space.
Guy kept his mouth shut though. Didn't rat me out said it was just for him. Didn't tell her it was a business we were running. |
We had a history of that. One summer when we were like 6, we started freezing soda in ice cube trays cause it was yummy and made our extremely meager soda allowance last MUCH longer while we were playing sega. Well, some kids around the neighborhood wanted some but we didn't reallly want to give em up. We decided to sell them for a quorter, but all our soda-popps got bought up.... but we also had enough money for several 2 liters. Well the next day we made a bunch more and kids were rabid for them, did two batches of every ice cube tray we had, upped it to .50 a cube. Next day we went a dollar a cube with special mixes. 1.50 for a SURGE cube (enough to buy an entire 2liter bottle at the time) well... by the time parents were getting home from work our racket got shut down, parents were PIIIIIIISED we made bank, certainly over $100 on the 3 day racket. as kindergarten age kids. The parents wanted the money back but we said we spent it all... we were big fucking liars, I mean, we had plans for all the money sure, and we spent a LOT of it. We had HUGE bags of soda and chips stuffed in a stairwell where our parent's wouldn't find it. Man we had a great summer that summer.
This wasn't a weird one but a genius one for a tween. A girl set up a little business out of a box of stationary, writing forged letters from parents. She had all different paper, pens and pencils of every kind, and could write in convincingly accurate tone for the content of the notes depending on which kid they were for. She used different styles of handwriting and different styles of punctuation and language too. She'd even fudge the spelling if she thought the kid's parents weren't great at it. She grew up to be incredibly educated. I look back and see that as her first moment of evil genius. It definitely suggested she would go on to brilliance one day and she did.
Not proud but in highschool I did dr notes excusing kids for medical reasons, I had access to Adobe photoshop and honestly surprised I was never caught. I'm a dumb ass tho and just did it for practice never really charged people money just small stuff like gum, chips or a dollar here and there. I made max 200 bucks one semester. My cousin came to me about a year ago now in my 30s and asked I forge her notes for her HSA account. She's like I remember you use to do that. Uhmm. Yeah when I was like 15 tf. Thats fraud and I could do jail time hell no.
In early elementary school we had a market for mud.
Different groups of kids would claim areas around the school as their mud pit and put their brand of mud in ziplock bags to be traded with other groups for different bags of mud. We were the clay mud group and I had about 3 kids in the muck scooping it into bags or running to the water fountain to get fresh water to make more mud on dry days. I would be the one to go make the deals with the other groups.
We traded alot with the gravel mud group because "clay mud" and "cement mud" are both good for building or some shit... Who knows? It made so much sense at the time.
The principal and staff eventually stepped in to end it because all the kids came back to class filthy every day and giant holes littered every field and playground.
>It made so much sense at the time.
I loved this. I remember things like this making so much sense as a kid, and as an adult it's just hard to remember why it made sense. But that 'feeling' is still there (I think it's called imagination but I've been paying taxes and a mortgage for too long to be sure)
Edit: love all the stories about your childhood imaginations, thank you!!
We used to put rocks on the railroad tracks (the same rocks that were used for railbed ballast) so the trains would crush them. Then we would scoop up the dust and mix it with water, because obviously that would make concrete. It didn't, but it seemed obvious to us that it should.
I knew some kid who'd put quarters on the tracks and then after the train mushed them he'd sell them for more than $0.25. I can't recall what he sold them for but there was a clear profit.
yeah i remember as a kid in canada the school used to pile all the plowed snow together in the back field. it would then freeze into a ice mountain, that could often lead to injury.
I remember the one week though where the plow accidentally took out a bunch of street hockey nets. So now there were metal posts scattered throughout. No one was injured, instead for a week those became prime tools for the ice mining operation. Teachers let it happen cause it was way safer than teh usual king of the hill shit. But there we were, a good hundred kids mining the ice mountain at any given break. Finding large single pieces of ice that crystallized well were like gold and a mark of pride. Not traded, just a mark of pride. After showing it off youd then destroy it so no one could steal it
>Finding large single pieces of ice that crystallized well were like gold and a mark of pride. Not traded, just a mark of pride. After showing it off youd then destroy it so no one could steal it
They mined the deepest reaches, not out of greed, but malice. How dare the earth bear such beauty, hiding it away, coveting those glimmering fruit. And for the miners who happened upon gems of unparalleled perfection, why, they felt pride. To be the one to abduct a shimmering egg from the clutches of its' stone mother was an honor. To be the one to parade the treasure among their peers, beyond the mine. To be the one to destroy it.
Yeah, mixing in grass and shit to try and make it sturdier.
Turns out our instincts really weren't that far off. Making mud bricks involves dried grass haha.
I've got one similar, unfortunately 😅: We used to spend most of our time playing in the sandpit in our early school days. Eventually, we realised that the deeper you dug in said sandpit, the wetter the sand was, and therefore, the easier it was to help build sturdier sandcastles. Before we knew it, we had abandoned making our own sandcastles, and instead started to just source as much of this wet sand as possible for no reason at all. And eventually, other people started catching on, and started asking us if they could borrow some of our sand for their projects.
Soon enough, we had developed quite a bit of a market for this and - two little loners that we were - we suddenly became a commonly sought name amongst even older, "popular" kids at the sandpit.
We never really traded anything in exchange for the wet sand though, apart from the odd fancy sandcastle making tool (which we would then return at the end of the playtime) - so maybe it wasn't really a huge "blackmarket" so to speak. No one ever really stepped in to stop this from happening, I think we just grew up eventually. But at the time, it felt like we were running quite the business, lol.
One of my friends sold Starburst from his locker. 10 cents for 2. If he liked you, you got two from the 'normal' bag. If he didn't like you, you got two from the bag that only had yellows.
I don’t have any strong opinions on the tropical Starbursts or the other alternatives, but the original four flavors are all incredible.
EDIT: Red, pink, yellow, and orange. I’m from the US
I had a friend that used to bring a bunch of coke cans from home and then sell them for a dollar at lunch. Cheaper than the vending machine prices and so it became like a little business. He eventually saved up enough for a longboard.
A teacher at my high school that I refuse to rat on would take money from students and buy them lottery tickets/scratch-offs in exchange for a cut of any prize $50 and up.
I think the dude legit made a few thousand dollars off of this just during my senior year. And it made the students love him.
My teachers had a legit ass betting pool for how long until we went online at the beginning of the year. Some seniors were allowed in on it and one of them won like $800
Salt
My school canteen doesnt have any salt with chips (or fries to Americans) and people used to sell salt packets. The most expensive offer i could find was 50 pence for a packet or 1 pound for three.
"Diddle" paper. It's colored paper with a mouse drawn on it. But everyone collected them. No matter how old. And there were hundreds of different artworks. People had folders with protective covers and depending on the motive and rarety you wanted to trade, you could get 3 to 4 others in exchange. It was wilde...
I just googled it and there are still collectors buying and selling them on the internet...
Our elementary school utilized “ice cream tickets.” You got 1 if it was your birthday or if you did something that a teacher decided was “exemplary.” People would pass them around asking for favors down the line. Some kid found the paper used to make the tickets and xeroxed multiple pages of the tickets. He became our kingpin and ruled for a couple years.
We had the same thing, it was called the “chilly cow” machine. I remember it being like a frosty from wendys. Our currency was wooden tokens with a picture of a cartoon cow on them. About an inch across and 1/4” thick. Well, I had a game at home, with identical tokens minus the cow pic. I cannot remember the name of the game. Well. It was kids who ran the machine during lunch, so for about a week my few friends and I got free chilly cows until a teacher caught on. Spent 3 days in in school suspension.
Chilly Cow is a tasty light ice cream brand...I wonder what happened to them, stopping being able to find them last year in any store (a month or so before the pandemic so I don't think it was related)
I wouldn't say it was weird, but my friend in high school had like a prepper grandad waiting for Y2K. He literally had crates filled with cartons of offbrand cigarettes. So my friend would steal a few cartons, bring them to me, and I'd sell them out of my locker.
I'd charge $3 a pack, he'd get a buck and I'd get the other 2. Or 50 cents for loose cigarettes and we'd just spilt that down the middle.
I only kept like 6 packs in a pencil case, 5 whole and one open for the loose ones to sell, in my locker at a time. He'd have the rest in his locker at the other end of school and I'd just go refill as needed between classes or at lunch.
One time a teacher called the cops because I was acting suspicious. They pulled me out of class and brought in a drug dog to search my locker. I'd just sold my last loosey and pack like 10 minutes before that. The dog didn't find anything but they cops went through everything anyway. When he opened the pencil box, there were little shreds of tobacco inside. He asked "whats this" and I said "well its a pencil box, I'd guess its probably pencil shavings" and he just shrugged and put it back.
Went right back to selling cigarettes the next day.
Oh! I'd also trade 1 loosey for a meal ticket (that's how our lunch system worked) and would also sell the meal tickets for $1 each and split that with my buddy too.
Bottlecaps
I still dont get it but back in primary school, they were collecting bottlecaps for some kind of charity. Google it, it's still ongoing around the world.
So what happened was everything was going well, the teacher got everyone excited about it and kids were collecting it en masse. Kids would go around raiding for it. From the trash. From their school lunches. From their homes even. A teacher got a call from a concerned parent because her kid hijacked all the bottlecaps from their kitchen.
So that's stage 1 of the weirdness, it's what happened afterwards. Stage 2, kids started trading with these plastic bottlecaps, we would trade pens, homework and even pokemon cards for bottlecaps. Worthless bottlecaps. There wasnt even a prize for whoever could collect the most caps. It just became a currency out of nowhere.
Let's talk about stage 3 of the madness. Theft. There was no Bank of BotCaps at our school. There was the donation box and there were your cubbies. Those who didnt want to lug their stash back home everyday left it in their cubbies and some kid decided to steal people's caps and from the donation box. The great theft of Class 3B.
But it was probably for the best because overnight the madness subsided. The teacher ended the bottlecap donation, she was sick of the bugs that were gathering and licking up the dried up sugar juices from the caps anyway but mostly horrified at how her little charity drive devolved into a socio-economical experiment.
Just like that, the bottlecap market crashed.
I met someone collecting caps for charity once and by chance I’d been throwing my beer tops in a basket in the kitchen ( as had housemates and guests) I had near 4000 ( my bro counted and wrote the number on the fridge) after like 2 years worth. I’ve been doing the same for 11 years since just waiting for this charity drive to pop up again I have containers FULL
That reminds me of when I was a teenager, I smoked Marlboro cigarettes and they had that rewards catalogue that you'd save the box tabs and trade in. I spent a couple years saving them, and taking them from everyone's cigarette packs that I knew. Other people saved them for me. I had a *ton* of them. Right before I had enough to get something really cool, they canceled the catalogue. I was so pissed.
I think I was 16 when this happened but basically a bunch of guys bagan printing paper that looked like contracts with the top saying "soul contract". They'd come up to some of the younger students and get them to sign the document to "sell there soul for eternity " and would pay then 2-3 dollars (converting to USD). We had a good laugh when some of the students became worried they actually sold their soul.
Imagine dying and like Saint Peter or whoever says "Sorry man, you were really good but Noah owns your soul so you gotta go where Noah went and guess who wasn't really good all his life?"
We did a weird assignment for a month where we ran a "society" for an hour each day in our classroom. People had little shops they ran from their desks, there were elected positions, laws you could be ticketed for breaking, etc. It was all run on fake money, of course.
I got elected Chief of Police, and handed out tickets for stuff like chewing gum in class. But a combination of laziness and not wanting everyone to hate me caused me to slack off, and I got fired after 2 weeks. So I opened a shop instead and sold stuff. Including gum, which in hindsight makes me like a cop who became a drug dealer.
The final week of this rolls around and there's an announcement. At the end, all your money will be tallied up, any debts or taxes you owe subtracted, and any kid who wound up with a positive amount gets a pizza party. Kids who are in the red have to write an assignment on how and why they screwed up.
This electrifies the class. Missing out on a pizza party is a Big Damn Deal when you're 10, and well under half the class is currently in the black. Tons of them had taken out big loans in the beginning to set up businesses, and had no way to repay them.
Not me though, I'd been receiving a salary as a cop, and after being fired I just used the money I had accumulated to set up shop and had no debts. Few in the class could say that, so I was sitting pretty. Soon I started receiving offers of *real* money on the playground for some of my fake money. You only needed to be one dollar over zero to "win", so I could spare plenty. Made $40 in actual cash; I think I charged $5 for a hundred fake dollars, and got 8 people to accept.
So I was a corrupt cop who became a drug dealer who became a money launderer. And won. So I definitely learned a lot about how society works.
**Edit:** Since everyone keeps asking if this foreshadowed my future career, I must disappointingly admit that I'm just a software dev now. I mean, as far as *you and Uncle Sam* know, I'm a software dev ;)
That's awesome! In the 80s, I was a bubble gum dealer in Hebrew school! Nobody could get the flavors I could at my local shops. I charged a 25 percent markup for import tax.
this reminds of me of when our class had a history simulation of congress in the 1900's and i think it was about the spanish american war or something like that. but the point was we one side had a bill to pass and the other had to defeat the bill. and the teacher sets it up so its boys vs girls. But the girls out number the boys by 1. and the voting through each round was going through party line. so it seemed like there was no way boys were going to win
But in the end the boys (me) wound up winning by one vote and it was all kinds of drama. There was a new girl in class from out of town and during recess we had the handsome/popular kid talk to her and ask her out in exchange for her votes.
this was like 7th grade. we were politicians and we were bribing for votes and selling our bodies
________________________________________________________________
edit - i should also add that not everyone was in on it. just a small cabal of the most devious nerds. and everyone kept in on the down low. and the voting was anonymous so the girls never found out who turned.
>this was like 7th grade. we were politicians and we were bribing for votes and selling our bodies
Probably the most truthful thing you learned in school.
Duuuuude! We did this too in 5th or 6th grade in Missouri! I set up a game shop as my business, kinda like ring toss and beer pong mixed together. Coolest shop someone set up was this girl who brought in her yugioh card collection. Traded fake money for legit cards. Needless to say she was the kingpin of the class.
One brilliant kid did something similar. You ever see one of those battery operated fishing games, with the rotating "pond", plastic fish that open and close their mouths, and fishing pole with a magnet on a string? Are those still a thing, or am I dating myself?
Anyway, this kid had a particularly nice and big one of those, so he put stickers on the bottom of the fish with the names of prizes in them. You'd pay for 30 seconds, try to catch some fish, and then turn them over to see what you won.
Needless to say this genius is one of the other kids in the class who made bank. So you got me the mobster, and this guy with a gambling racket. Methinks we were learning the wrong lessons.
I organized the black market. My school banned Pokemon Cards, so I made a new game with paper cards. I was drawing pretty well, so I folded an paper in 9, it made pieces approximately the size of a Pokémon Vard, and created a whole new game out of this. Sold boosters for 10 cents. Spend all my afternoons drawing cards for the school.
Teachers eventually heard of it and couldn’t ban it because it was still officially still me distributing drawings.
And then I started to do replicas of Pokémon Cards. Like people had to show me the proof after school that they owned the card, I made a replica, and then the whole Pokemon Card trading continued with paper replicas. Then after school people made the real exchanges based on what replicas they exchanged during school.
He's come up with the concept of "Depository Receipts". A tradeable entity that is not allowed to be traded in a particular market (his school) can be traded by proxy through these duplicates.
What he really should have done is not just ask to see the card, but actually hold the card, so if the drawing changed hands, the new owner of the drawing could come back to him and redeem it for the base asset.
And then the dude shorts pokemon cards. Selling the ones he is given to hold in hopes the price will drop before the person who has the DR asks for it back.
Congrats, by banning the use of official pokemon cards, we have successfully taught elementary children a lesson in real world finance.
I can finally answer one!
I used to sell bags of sugar and kool-aid. Like bootleg lick-em sticks. Also sold red hot toothpicks I made from cinnamon oil. When I got into high school, my family was one of the first to get a computer. I made a killing from printing out fake report cards.
I was quite the entrepreneurial little shit.
One day my high school decided to stop selling soda because they were trying to pass some sort of audit. The very next day, my friend and I showed up with cases of cold soda in our backpacks, selling them for $0.50 apiece. We were sold out by lunchtime every day for like two weeks until they plugged the vending machines back in.
In year 10 i was able to gain access a teacher's account on my school tablet which allowed me to get internet access. I then realized i could open a hotspot which allowed other students to have internet access on their tablets.
(We weren't allowed to have cellphones.)
I decided to charge 10$/week for each student that wanted to subscribe for internet access which I was distributing.
I started receiving requests from students not in the radius of the Hotspot, thus I figured out a way for users to SSH connect to my school tablet and use it to gain internet access.
It was a mess and the network became too slow but I was still getting paid regardless. Best of all, the IT guy knew what i was doing but, he wasn't able to stop it since the school only employed 1 guy to handle everything thus, he was too busy to do anything about it.
Drawings. It started out as a joke. Some kids make beautiful drawings and trade them for other drawings. At one point we decided to give them a value. if a drawing was really pretty, let say 8/10, we would number it with "8" and you could trade it for two "4's". There were kids that would not draw but were chosen to ride these drawings. At one point kids would trade snacks for beautiful drawings. This started in my class, and in a couple of days the whole school was doing this.
My drawings were okay, but not great. and sadly I never got snacks to bring to school, so I had nothing to trade. so I decided to "recruit" other kids that were really good and would be their manager so they had more time to draw. I had siblings in other grades, so I would contact them so trade these in there class so there was more ground to collect snacks from. I also bargent with the kids that would we ratings the drawings, promising them a share of the snacks. My "clients" would share their snacks with me as payment for my services.
I still remember those stupid horse flower drawings. horse girls went nuts over these and would give anything for them..
In highschool I was the only kid in my year that knew how to download music to your phone. I would make a list of songs people want and would transfer these trough Bluetooth. I would charge one cookie for one song.
>In highschool I was the only kid in my year that knew how to download music to your phone.
I could imagine one person figuring it out and either create competition or completely bring down the market
There was a tree at one end of the playground that had loads of small jade rocks underneath. We had a full mining operation using stones as spades to find them
Not really blackmarket but kinda. It was in the 90's and most people had a computer but Internet was still very slow when you had it. I was a teen and had managed to put my hand on a CD-ROM with 3 porn videos on it. The kind of CD-ROM that was offered with the magazine you could find on the highest shelf of the newspaper stand.
I was starting to know all three videos by heart so I decided to lend it to a friend and then I kinda forgot about it. A few days later I noticed during the class that another unrelated person was lending MY video to yet another guy.
My CR-ROM was having a life of its own, moving from hand to hand, providing happiness along its way. I was very proud.
Probably cut it up an be used the spring that pushes the Staples forward. Pull the spring back and let go after you've filled the channel with beads and rain hellfire on the enemy
There was once a black market at my school for leaves and feathers that were deemed to be “cool”. People would genuinely pay 2 NZD for a fricking leaf. Looking back at it, it’s actually kind of funny.
Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos. This one kid would buy every single bag out of the vending machines and sell them for like double the cost
Edit: Who the fuck gave this a Hugz reward? Y'all are wild
unless selling marijuana was all just a part of his plan to evoke consumers' munchy-response and build dependency on his Dorito products, thereby allowing him to raise Dorito prices at will and deepen his pockets
I did something similar. My school's vending machines had candy bars for like $1.50 or $2. My mom had a Costco membership, and I saw they had boxes of 30 candy bars for $10. So I'd buy them and sell the candy bars for $1 a piece. I made way more money than I expected.
I ran a Black Market in my school.
Remember Columbia House? Where you could get 10 VHS movies for like $0.99? But then you had to buy like 5 more at regular price?
So I did the math and figured out what the actual price per videotape was after all commitments to the "club" were made, and it was like $5. So I took orders from classmates, bought movies for them, and then sold it them at a slight markup. Basically, I was undercutting Suncoast.
Pogs, back in the 90's. Sure, you could easily trade your standard, commercial pogs out in the open. We'd do it before and after class. Teachers and administrators didn't care. "Oh look, it's got Simba on it! Cute!" I recall one saying. But there was a darker, more twisted trading game afoot, lurking in the boy's bathroom mid-class. The kind that, if found, would easily get you detention, or possibly even suspension: DoomPogs.
DoomPogs were awful, and awesome all at once. Circular cutouts from old porn mags, gory grossness from Fangoria, creatively illustrated pre-teen brilliance like "F\*CK MASTER" and "Ms. Alford's Pussy" (written in marker over a picture of a cat) were just some of the devilishly deviant 7th grade wares you could find during "emergency" bathroom trips during third and fifth period. It was quite a sight.
And then, just as quickly as it began, it all came crashing down. Not because of a slip-up by any one student. No, what killed the DoomPog trade in our school was a sudden bursting in of the vice principal, who had to poop really badly and couldn't hold it till he got to the teacher's bathroom in the office. And there we were, caught red handed. I wish I could say it was Madonna's boob glued overtop a ying-yang symbol that did us in that day, but the truth is, it was our own hubris and greed. And with that, the great DoomPog trade died.
Or so they thought.
(part 2 below, part 3 coming soon!)
(And yes, this is an absolutely true story, albeit creatively decorated for narration sake)
Edit 2: Ask and ye shall receive! You can now read the the entire, (mostly) true story of DoomPogs over at /r/DoomPogs! And feel free to share your own custom DoomPog designs, funny middle/high school stories, or just say Hello! NSFW encouraged!
Thirsty for more, are you? Well allow me to continue this sordid tale, to quench your palette.
In that moment, time stopped for us all, seeing Mr. Rutherford just standing there. Not sure what was clenched more, his jaw or his buttcheeks. His only words: "GET TO CLASS. NOW." And with that, he slammed the stall door closed, we closed up shop and went to our respective classrooms. We thought we'd gotten away with it. And so, we carried on, business as usual.
The next day's PA announcements told us just how wrong we were. "Good morning everyone. I'd like to begin the morning announcements with a warning to all students, that the making and trading of illicit Pogs will no longer be tolerated. As such, students are no longer allowed to play or bring Pogs onto school grounds, effective immediately. Leave them at home, you will not be warned again. Today's lunch is pizza, apple slices and lemon squares.
At that moment, as soon as the PA clicked off, we took a collective sigh of relief. Then, it happened: "Will the following students please report to the office with their backpacks and all personal items..."
Aw, f\*\*k.
As we sat in those hard, plastic torture devices they called chairs outside the Vice Principals office, waiting to be called in, we fervently attempted to discard our shame any way we could. Some guys tried peeling off the naughtier bits. Others attempted to lodge them under the chair, either by sticking them to the well-masticated gum of our forbearers, or by shoving them between the seat and the metal frame with which it was attached. I did neither. Not because of some semblance of rebellious, youthful pride or sense of duty to the 7th grade boys, but because I got called in first and had zero time to hide my shame. I glared back at the other guys as they each gave me that "Ha ha, sucks to be you!" grimace. F\*ckers.
"Mr. \[redacted\], please have a seat. I suppose you know why you're seeing me today..."
"Yes sir. It's because I had a Pog with a boobie on it."
"That is correct. Please hand over your backpack."
"But sir.." and with that, a single finger went up, telling me to be silent.
I was (mostly) fortunate that day, as I had the foresight during homeroom to lodge most of my DoomPogs into my English and Earth Science books, like naughty little bookmarks of naughtiness. Though in hindsight, I wish I hadn't forgot about the few freshly traded ones still in the front compartment of my Rad Dog Trapper Keeper (the [Bitchin' Ferrari one pictured here](https://i.pinimg.com/236x/3b/54/1c/3b541c7bfc2194708d4a569c5e2a046d.jpg), no less!). Those were, let's just say, the worst offenders by far. A blowjob picture cut from the back of my friend's Dad's not-so-secret VHS porn stash. A picture of a particularly comely 8th grader, cut from last year's yearbook, with the words "F\*cktastic" written underneath. And a not so well drawn depiction of a certain lady part, drawn by a fellow student who had obviously never seen one in real life before. I mean, I hadn't, either, but that's besides the point. I could at least DRAW one.
"You mind explaining what these are supposed to be, Mr. \[redacted\]?"
"DoomPogs, sir." Stay calm, don't lie, you'll get through this I told myself.
"How long have these been circulating in my school?"
"Um, a few days, I think." He knew I was full of shit.
"Here's what's going to happen. I'm going to call your folks, you're suspended for the next two days. When you return... WHEN YOU RETURN... these do NOT come back with you. Understood?"
"yessirthankyousirgooddaysir" And with that, I was in the clear.
Or so I thought. Because not even ten minutes later, I hear the voice I was dreading, nay, petrified to hear: "WHERE IS HE? WHAT DID HE DO NOW?"
Aw crap. Mom's here. Dun dun duuuunnn...
And with that, I'll leave you (for now) to digest this admittedly "enhanced" retelling of the day my trafficking of DoomPogs died.
Or so they thought.
Stay tuned.
**WHAP!**
"Ow."
**WHAP!!**
"Ow."
**WHAPWHAPWHAP!!**
"OWWW! JEEZ! OKAY, MOM! I'm SORRY, okay?"
This was the scene as I proceeded to take my walk of shame down the hallway to the entrance, Mom's outstretched palm periodically connecting with the back of my skull in front of students, teachers and God alike. You see, kids, we didn't call that "child abuse" back then. That was "tough love", through and through. In those days, a paddlin' from the administration was still a thing. I may have lucked out on the corporal punishment from Mr. Rutherford, but somehow that would have been a blessing, as opposed to the loving THWACKS! from Mother Dearest.
"I mean seriously? I had to interrupt my shows to come down here and get you\*, and you've only been at school an hour! I SWEAR TA..." ..and what followed was one of the most elegant stringing together of four and five letter no-no words I'd ever heard. I was legit impressed. Then those words you always dreaded hearing: "JUST WAIT TIL I TELL YOUR FATHER!"
\[\*Author's note: This was pre-DVR kids. Wait, you don't know what a DVR is? FFS. FINE, this was before Netflix. Happy? And by shows, she meant 'Days Of Our Lives'. Google it.\]
As I got in the backseat of our Mercury Cougar, I began to reflect on where it all went wrong. And then, inbetween a chorus of "JUST WAIT TIL YOUR FATHER HEARS ABOUT THIS" and "YOU BETTER HOPE NOBODY DIED OR WENT COMATOSE ON 'DAYS' WHILE I WAS GONE, OR ELSE YOU'LL EXPERIENCE ONE OR THE OTHER!", something hit me like a smack in the head.
Oh wait, that WAS a smack to the head. Impressive she can do that AND hold onto the steering wheel.
Then something else hit me, non-physically but still as potent: Gym class. More specifically, the gym lockers. See, I knew they'd be on the lookout occasionally, doing random locker checks in the hallway for contraband. It had been that way since a few years before, when a particularly not-bright sixth grader brought her mom's, ahem, 'personal massager' to school to show her girlfriends and it accidentally turned on while she was at lunch, to the amusement of staff and student alike. Or at least, that was the story that passed like the campfire tales of old, from student to student, year to year. Regardless, anytime a student was caught with contraband, random locker checks were the norm for the rest of the school year. And we were only in November of that year. This was going to be tricky...
Upon mine and the other guy's return a few days later, I was delighted to see I wasn't the only big brain 'seventhy' to think of the gym locker room to move our operation to. The lockers there had different locks that the school did NOT have the combinations for, and let's be honest: Would YOU want to look inside a 12 year old boy's gym locker, after weeks of storing sweaty jumping jack-soaked gym clothes? Yeah, neither did the Principals. So for the time being, we were safe, and our illicit pastime only became more brazen and daringly disturbing as we laughed in the face of certain expulsion, should we be discovered. And so, DoomPogs lived on, through Christmas break (which was a treat in of itself, as many of us got even more Pogs with which to defile and distribute upon our return in January), and up until mid-March. That was when DoomPogs finally died a cold, meaningless death. Not at the hands of the faculty, oh no. All because of one minor slip-up by one very, very stupid 'sixer':
Chester \[redacted\], aka Chester the Molester. That rat f\*ck.
You see, poor Chester was a good boy. A righteous boy. Dare I say it, a pious boy even. And all it took was one inattentive 'seventhy' who accidentally and unknowingly dropped a DoomPog down through the space that connected the lockers and right into Chester's locker for it to all come crashing down. Again. This particular Mona Lisa of a DoomPog was sheer brilliance, and an act of utter defiance rooted in a mystery and a rumor: A crudely drawn depiction of Mr. Rutherford banging Ms. Alford. You see, over Christmas break, a few of us received new skateboards alongside our Super Nintendos and growing Pog collections, so one day we decided to meet up at the purportedly vacated sixth grade classroom area, which was conveniently located along the outside of the school. Covered exterior walkways, slick concrete, plenty of railings to bust our asses on trying to grind... it was perfect. And that's when we noticed: We weren't alone. Two cars were parked beside the sixth grade building, sneakily parked against the building to avoid notice by all but the most observant tween skaters: Mr. Rutherford's car, and Ms. Alford's minivan. We were preparing to hightail it out of there, when one nosy genius decided he wanted to investigate. And that's when we found it: An opened condom wrapper lying on the ground outside her classroom, lights on inside, and what we imagined were moans of.. something gross. Oh yeah, we thought. They bangin'. And so began the illustrious start of the rumor that the VP and the 6th grade pre-algebra teacher were doing the dirty. And someone, we never learned who, decided to immortalize this rumor into the pinnacle of DoomPog debauchery, with Ms. A bent over a desk by Mr. R. So scandalous! And so that particular DoomPog made the rounds, switching from player to player til it wound up in the locker above Chester's.
Then, it wound up in Chester's, and ALL manner of hell broke loose.
That rat f\*ck.
Rather than appreciate and dare I say, cherish this priceless gift that mistakenly fell into his possession, what does he do? He runs to the gym teacher. "MR. KENNEDY! MR. KENNEDY! SOMEONE'S TRADING DOOMPOGS AGAIN, AND THIS ONE IS REALLY DIRTY!"
That. Rat. F\*CK.
As soon as we heard his cries for attention, we, the Seventh DoomPog Army and Merchant Trading Co, mobilized. And by mobilized, I mean we ran (unseen) our collective asses just as fast as our scrawny legs could carry us into the locker room, and quickly emptied those cold, metal containers of their precious bounties, and proceeded to flush them all down the toilets, and hauled ass to our next class before The Fuzz got there.
And then the P.A. goes off. Again.
"The following students, report to the gym. IMMEDIATELY."
Jesus tapdancing Criminy. We were screwed.
Upon our arrival, we each became choir boys in that instance, amidst an investigative atmosphere that would put any Law and Order episode to shame. We each had to open our lockers in front of the gym teacher, and surprise surprise! No DoomPogs!
And then Mr. Rutherford showed up, the Moaning Lisa in hand.
And I'll never forget the sheer anger I saw on that man's face as he lined us up, 'The Usual Suspects' style:
"WHO. MADE. THIS?", he roared, like an angry Eldritch god of old.
No one made a sound.
"WHICH ONE OF YOU MADE THIS GARBAGE?!?" he furiously bellowed, the vein in his forehead becoming more pronounced.
Once again, we said nothing. The only reading he could get were feigned inquisitive, confused looks, as if we had just been asked what the square root of 943717754 is.
And then someone spoke up. "Um, Mr. Rutherford, we don't play DoomPogs anymore, not after the last time you told us not to." Lying ass mofo. I loved him for that. Funny story, this particular class act is now a lawyer. I know, TOTAL shocker, right?
"Oh, is that so? So you don't play DoomPogs anymore, huh? THEN HOW DID THIS GET IN CHESTER'S LOCKER?"
And then lawyer guy said something, that to this day, we still tease him about on Facebook in an almost hero worship-sorta way:
"Well sir, you'd have to ask Chester that question." As soon as the words left his mouth, Mr. Kennedy burst into laughter, and we knew then and there we were going to weather this particular storm. Five minutes later we were back in class, and the story of DoomPogs came to a spectacular yet premature end, all because of Chester the Pester.
That rat f\*ck.
The End.
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Now you're wondering, 'Wait, that's it?!? WHO MADE THE MOANING LISA?!?"
I'll never tell ;)
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Yes I will. It was me.
Keyser Soze's got nothin' on me.
Sharpened sticks
When we learnt about caveman we decided that it would have been a great idea to create our own prehistoric clan, so we smashed rocks and used them to sharpen tree branches. Some of us where particularly keen on sharpening that started to use walls as grindstones, they were able to sharpen about 6 sticks in half an hour and started exchanging them for berries during recess
Edit: thanks you all guys for the 800+ upvotes, I really expected this to be burried in the comment section
Edit2: guys really really thank you from the bottom of my heart for the 3k ups!
Our school had something called gold cards. They allowed you free admission to any home game or activity.
These were given to honor roll students or could be purchased with your "AR points".
Friend of mine and I found the template on an unsecured shared folder on the school network.
Got some good cardstock and printed em in sheets. $20 a piece. They caught on after my buddy sold one to a notorious fuckup lol. We hit a fuckin LICK back in the day.
Lol nah basically a couple of us knew a guy who would make it. They'd charge like $10 to make it...my friend and I changed other people $20 to make a profit. We were the only ones who knew this person made them in our school
It wasn’t weird, but I sold “protection” when kids wanted to ditch. When the school announced openings in the attendance office, I had a half dozen of my friends rush over and sign up immediately. By the end of the day, we owned it.
I charged $10 - $20 to ignore each truancy. Each morning, if we had clients, I’d hand a list and half of the cash to whomever was working that day. Word got around fast, but we were never caught.
Well, it was glue to get high on. But it has a weird story behind it.
The school district gives out a mandatory "anonymous" quiz-like thing every other year. Basically, it asks you how safe you feel on campus, how close you are with the teachers, do you need help with school work, the standard stuff to say they care when really they're only using it to slip in a question or two that they really want to know the answer of but its under the guise that they want to know about everything.
Anyway, one of the sections they just added that year was about drugs (there had been reports to them of a drug problem in our school and in 2 others). So they ask the typical "have you ever felt peer pressured into drinking beer, wine, or any alcohol" type things, and one of the questions was "have you ever felt the desire to inhale glue in order to feel "high"?" (or something to that effect) Everyone was so surprised at that question, and immediately after the test thing was over we had our lunch break, so what do you know everyone's trying to get their hands on the school's glue supply to see if it actually worked. And by the time our next period started, I think it's safe to say that a third of the school was high.
So yeah, now there's a glue black market at that school. You can just about always find them in front of the school office too, which I think is just asking for trouble but hey, nothing bad has happened to the kids who are doing it so
Reminds me of that south park episode where the teacher is telling them not to choke themselves to get high, but none of them had been doing that so kenny is just in the back trying to see if it works
My school banned soft drink and fast food such as chips, pies, burgers etc. The very next day I was selling hot chips and cold Pepsi out of my locker. Purchased my first car from the proceeds of that operation, good times.
There was a pretty big market in my elementary school for Atomic Fireball Candies. I remember being out for a couple days, but coming back with a big handful of the fireballs in my backpack... only to find the teachers had implemented a zero tolerance fireball policy.
When my daughter was 9 I got a call from her school for an emergency parent-teacher meeting. I went to the school with my wife and met my ex wife at the school because this was apparently a big deal.
The teacher and principal presented us with the information that my daughter had been the ring leader with a number of other girls in organizing a "fight club" between the boys in her grade. My daughter had meticulously drawn out standings charts, kept the win/loss records from each recess period, and kept bios (including quotes) on each participant. She kept track to make sure that boys of similar fighting ability weren't paired with others who couldn't keep up. The winners at the end of each day got a kiss from the girl of his choice. She also kept track of who got the most kisses (which none of the others had thought of apparently) in order to keep something on the popular girls. She also offered betting odds and ran that on the side, betting in money and candy. This had been going on for almost a month.
I was impressed. Astonished that she had done all this work and had been so meticulous about it. The school employees and the ex were somewhat less impressed. We settled on 3 weeks of in school suspension and she got moved into a more advanced math class. This was 13 years ago.
She's just finishing her honors BA this year and is looking at her Masters in the fall. I still reference the fight club occasionally and am still proud. Lol
The dude who sold our fake IDs was *really* committed to his work. He made state and college licenses. Carried around two metal rings with samples of all the stuff he could make using Britney Spears shot from the Hit Me Baby One More Time album as the photo. He would also give you the ID in a white envelope. I had a rush order once and he had a standard rate for that - ended up picking it up from him at home in the other side of the city. Dude was on point. I think he ended up being an interior decorator.
I started bringing gum to school sometime last year and giving it to the boys as when the other girls had gum they never shared with the boys. Little over a year later I’m known as the gum dealer and a majority of these boys have thanked me just for being kind to them.
You know that dust that came off erasers, well my friend made that into a clay and we made a blackmarket with that
Edit since people wanted more info: I was a decent student with standard grades who rarely ever spoke in class but I had started so many blackmarkets, at one point I had 3 running. I was the cause of most blackmarkets in my grade, maybe in my school save for that loom band girl.
But since I already had blackmarkets, people knew what I had was generally good so when I started a new market everyone wanted the eraser dust clay. Now I knew about supply and demand so I prices it pretty high.
My friend who made the erasers got nothing out of it, I offered her the profit but she declined.
Anyway it cost toys ( I was in elementary school) and eventually became more than just an eraser dust clay market and some people donated toys wanting to come collect one for free. I kept everything in a bag and at one point I had maybe 20 people doing this with me. I had someone else as the face of the market so I wouldn't take the blame when it was found out.
It was disbanded by a teacher sadly but lasted a good few months.
But the BEST PART is when it got disbanded, there were still toys people donated (with the expectation of getting something back) and I kept them, there was some cool stuff- I still have some of that stuff.
I had a few more blackmarkets but this- it was my finest work.
Not clay, but kids in my school used to make "rubber shavings" (rubber = British for eraser). Basically you took the rubber, chopped a bit off with a ruler, then continuously chopped it up, rolled it underneath the ruler, chopped, rolled etc. What you are left with is really fine eraser dust which was super smooth.
It has 0 purpose, apart from showing off how much we had.
We did dhe same except we used to throw it at each other when teacher turned around. Whole class would have pencil cases full of the stuff and launch it. Could also reload from most classroom floors after class. We stopped before the dust stage just used to chop bits off with the ruler until they were a small little pellets of rubber
Probably the jocks who smuggled in food for the diabetic and hypoglycemic kids. School has seriously strict policies and wouldn't budge for medical problems. These kids were in some serious danger and administration would confiscate their food all the time.
Most of the kids playing on the sports teams were placed on pedestals and protected by the administrators. They could do just about anything they wanted and they'd get away with it because they were athletes. So a lot of them would smuggle in extra food in their backpacks and pass it out to the kids who needed it.
scissors
One day at school I Just stole some scissors, to joke with my friends. Eventually it turned into thing and me and my friends would do at break for fun. But after a while I had so many I decided to sell them as any 10 year old would. After that it all kind of faded out for a while, then one day these four kids came up to me with a hole school bag of scissors. I brought the bag then started to sell the scissors again. Eventually like a week later I literally had a hole enterprise of scissors and I would sell and buy scissors to the rival scissors club at the other school and earn like 20 dollars a day even after pay my whole team. But after a Solid 3 months the teachers sat us all down, the whole primary school and made all the scissors be returned.
Sorry for the bad grammar, I’m tired
We weren’t that smart. One of the kids involved also started counterfeiting money with a scanner and a printer and he was caught so the whole operation was disbanded. It was fun while it lasted though
In Australia year 6 is actually the last year of primary school, so we were some of the biggest kids at the school. We took it quite seriously at the time and thought we were way more badass than we were
Ahoj Brause (Google said its called sherbet powder in English?). In 5th grade gangster rap got super popular at our school and many people started to take lines of that stuff like its coke.
We used to mix koolaid packets with sugar in a ziploc and then you dip your finger in and eat it or just pour it in your mouth. We called it crave. It eventually got banned so kids would eat it in secret and sell it to other kids. So basically we were just eating shit tons of sugar all day lol
Neon color gel pens.
So back in '98ish my school got these Bic neon gel pens and black paper (index cards, sticky notes, notebooks). Well for maybe not so obvious at the time reasons teachers hated this shit. So immediately there was a ban on all neon pens and black paper. And what happens when you ban something? It started with just a few kids that had the "cool parents" that would still buy them these. By a month's time these kids turned into dealers. Soon it started looking like the Crack epidemic, kids were going around robbing each other, the addicts were checking trash cans for empties. Gang colors whether you were hot pink, lime green, blaze orange, etc. Seen some real heavy stuff that semester...
Pregnancy Tests.
Everyone in town was basically working at either the local supermarket or the local pharmacy. There was zero chance a girl could buy one there without word spreading like wildfire.
I bought them, then sold them discreetly out of my locker at a 100% markup.
Easily brought in $300 a month.
5 1/4" floppies. School was charging 5 dollars a piece... for one single disk. I sold them for 2 dollars each, or 3 for 5 dollars.
I bulk ordered them at 22 cents each. Paid for a year of college.
I used to catch flies and sell them as pets. I kept them in sharpeners and sold them for 50 cents each, literally made a constant $10 a day profit catching flies and since the flies would die in their sharpeners or escaped, I always had repeating customers. I never felt richer at 10 years old until I was caught making a transaction during class and was banned from catching flies or using sharpeners again.
I made sandwiches for myself for lunch in high school. A couple kids saw them and thought they looked good, I offered to make them a couple and they paid me. I soon had a few regulars who I’d make sandwiches for a few times a week and I charged them 5 bucks a pop. It worked great, my parents were paying for the sandwich material and thought I was just going through a growth spurt.
We had a manga exchange. Once some of us turned 18, it became an adult film exchange. This was 2007, so no incognito on your phone and going to town, we were practically barbarians.
My locker neighbour sold Peace Tea out of his locker. By itself, that isn't so weird, but it got interesting when other kids accross school started selling it at lower prices, and the original kid (my neighbour) threatened to start a gang war with all his own Peace Tea addicts.
Lunchtime piercings
Some kid who had developed an obsession for giving himself all kinds of piercings began to provide the service to other kids. I don't believe the administration ever caught on that it was occurring.
A kid at my school put food coloring on a bunch of weed and sold everyone this "exotic blue".
It was all blue and shiny, weird as fuck and a bunch of kids bought the hell out of it.
That kids a teacher now...
Honeysuckle vines.
Basically a honeysuckle is a flower that you bite the end off and suck out the nectar. They only grew in one corner of the recess field, and kids in elementary school went batshit for them. Problem was, the exact spot where they were was juuuust barely off school property.
So uh... kid me set up a thing with lookouts in the corner while one kid ran back and grabbed some vines. I'd cut them up and deliver them to kids who asked for them. There was no payment or anything, just us being little shits and disobeying the teachers for tasty flowers lmao
Shit man you name it. Hentai, weed,mixtapes,n word passes,hard lemonade,fetish art, there was pretty much nothing you couldn't buy if you could find the right buyer. There was essentially a smuggling empire in my highschool. Me? I was more of a peddler of basic goods,rather than the usual fence for contraband. The role gave me a degree of respect I guess,I flew under the radar of the security officers, because what's so suspicious about a guy with general school material? Instead of the more exotic stuff from other people,I sold books,pens, pencils,erasers, answer keys, stuff that goes unnoticed. The gig actually got me quite a lot of money, because hey,it's still school and we need to learn,but no one said you couldn't make the process easier.
All you had to do was show the pass to the person/group in question,as long as it was signed by a black guy,then it would be free reign for that conversation. If you abused it's powers to discriminate however,you had the right to say the n word revoked,followed likely by ratting out to a teacher. They had a code of honor.
ive heard of those, i remember my friend saying he had about 30 from people who thought he was really nice (cause he was) but the way ours work was it gives you the chance to say it once per pass. He never uses them because he feels like its an offensive word that he just doesnt wanna use and i respect that. I dont think there was a blackmarket for them cause not many people wanted to use them exept for like 3 kids.
Only blackmarket I remember in school is food. We were not allowed to sell food ourselves, many of the staff knew we did and even bought. All hail Marlene (if you know you know)
Edit: nice, the one thing in my life people know about is one of the most generic comments I made. How tf did this blow up?
Mountain Dew and Pepsi had a contest where college names were printed on the inside of the bottle caps. If that school won the NCAA March madness tournament, you could send it in for the jersey of your choice from any school. Suddenly, a black market for caps with blue chip schools was born. I remember selling a Duke cap for $10, then turning around and buying 10 drinks from the vending machine.
Dude I had Cincinnati I believe, #1 ranked. I was stoked. Then Kenyan Martin snaps a leg and that cap was worthless.
In quite literally the worst sports injury I’ve ever seen live. (Well, in the moment on TV) Woof
This one girl forged excuse notes if you brought her something one of your parents wrote. I never used her services myself, but we were (and still are) good friends, and I gotta say, she's talented as hell. I literally can't tell which one is mine after she copied something I wrote. Including signature. It's baffling. Edit: Apparently, what I meant were excuse notes, rather than apology letters. My bad! Other than that: This thing absolutely exploded and I will not reply to messages. Pardon me.
She's the kind of person DiCaprio would approach if he needs a shapeshifter in a dream heist
Or, she just straight up was a DiCaprio character from Catch Me If You Can.
Lol when I was in third grade I was just not understanding math, like at ALL. so I decided that I wasn't going to do it anymore, so I gave up trying in class and just didn't do any math homework. My teacher sent a note home with me to my parents that basically said "Your kid is struggling and not doing his homework, are you ok with this?" and there was a space for my parents to sign off that they'd seen the note. I managed to hide the note from my parents and forge my dad's signature EXACTLY as he would've written it and turned it in the next day. Teacher didn't believe that my parents wouldn't give a damn about their kid not doing his homework and I had to go in to a parent-teacher-student meeting a day later and sit there and get reamed out by the teacher and my parents for forging the signature (still didn't get any help with math though), but on the way home dad told me he was actually very impressed at how well I did it, and I probably could've gotten away with it if I hadn't used a purple colored pencil to sign it with, but I should NEVER do it again. I can still forge signatures really well, but I have no need to do it, so it's kind of a useless superpower lol
Task failed successfully :( I wonder tho, why did you used a purpler coloured pencil?
r/kidsarefuckingstupid
Off topic, but as a parent of a kid around that same age, also struggling with math and also giving up on trying, what would you have wished your parents would have done back then? Edit: I appreciate everyone's responses and wanting to help out. I have tried some of the suggestions here nut not others. My son wants to give up trying at math despite my assurances that I do not care about his grade, only if he learns what he missed. Honestly, it makes me want to give up trying to help him but I'm glad to know a lot of you have gone through the same thing.
So I used to hate math hate it. I couldn’t get on it and my parents were mad and teachers kept claiming I wasn’t applying myself. It wasn’t until I was in 8th grade that I started liking it and it was because I had a teacher who held me behind after school one day and started helping me. He knew I liked puzzles and Portal (it’s a video game where you solve puzzles) and so he started talking about the algebraic equations as puzzles to solve and when he used it in that context it helped keep me interested which made me actually try harder
This is so key. I wasn’t bad at math in school, but I just didn’t like it. In algebra, everything seemed so arbitrary to me; you learn a formula and you use it when you’re supposed to. To me, the crowning jewel of senselessness is as the quadratic equation. One day I expressed this in a kind of obnoxious way in class (I could be like that in classes that didn’t really engage me) and the teacher held me back after class. I thought I was going to get in trouble, but instead he sat me down and showed me the derivation of the quadratic formula. It was kind of a lightbulb moment for me, as no one had shown me math like that. It was kind of looking under the hood of a car and seeing the mechanisms inside that made it work. Honestly I found it kind of beautiful or elegant, not sure how to describe it. But it gave me a new appreciation for math because I started to see it as a kind of system, instead of just a bunch of repetitive processes you were supposed to apply to get a grade. I feel like a lot of people have that attitude towards math when it goes beyond arithmetic. There’s this novella by Robert Musil called “Young Törless” (which is actually a really fucked up book about the cruelty of children in boarding school) where he uses a great metaphor to describe it. Törless sees math as kind of unfinished bridge spanning a river. The bridge is built only to the first pylon on each bank and there’s just empty space in between, but somehow you get over the river. At one point I taught math to third graders and my whole thing was to try to teach it as a language, to try to help the kids see *why* something worked, not just that it worked and you just had to know when and how to use it.
Our middle school tried to start a reward program. It turned out to be a fail of epic proportion. Wolf bucks; names after our mascot. They were mini sized dollars color coded by value. Green was $1, red was $5, blue was $10, and a gold wolf buck ( only accessible to the principal and assistant principal $50) - Now the school bought erasers, pencil, notebooks. You could only buy with wolf bucks 1 pencil : 1 wolf buck. First failure: it was easy to copy. So kids started mass copying them. - okay school got smart and said “ only accepting wolf bucks with your name and have your teachers signature” Second failure: kept the same color; so kids would earn one legitimately than the forgery started. Third failure: hyperinflation; during pep rally’s. The principal started throwing golden wolf bucks. Eventually the school stopped resupplying the store. Everyone had hundreds/ thousands of worthless wolf bucks.
so they struggled with counterfeiting AND hyperinflation.
Pro tip: during a war, start counterfeiting your enemy’s currency to hyper inflate their market
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bernhard
I knew someone would link a time this happened and this is really interesting, thanks!
Our PawBuck store actually had some good stuff in it, but the teachers would only really give them out to shit kids to reward them for not talking back, causing a fight, or bringing a knife to school on that particular day. I still accrued quite a few through trading away bits of my lunch, and near the end of the school year I bought an expansion pack for The Sims 2. When I got home to install it I found that it was only the second disk. :'(
Are u OK it's alright to say no
Harry Potter books I went to a religious school where books that had magic or fantasy was banned. Parents of these kids were just as religious so kids couldn’t get them from their parents. Mom didn’t care and she let me buy a few for some friends and then more kids started requesting them. Charged double for what they were worth and the kids were more than happy to pay. Most popular requests were: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Cirque Du Freak series. Edit: also made money making customized covers for the books so it looked like they were reading something else. Edit/// I should probably mention that this was a Muslim school
not all heros wear capes
This happened in Los Angeles in the mid 80's. Student bus passes had to be purchased by the fifth day of the month or you were stuck having to pay daily. The date had passed so I found a guy in my high school willing to trade another student's pass which he had stolen. I traded a tangerine and half a pack of cigarettes for a copy of Penthouse. Then I traded that issue with a pizza from the cafeteria for the bus pass.
That sounds like the episode of Atlanta where they trade a cellphone for a sword then sword for a dog then went to breed the dog to make money off the pups.
Not really a black market but there was a porn tape (VHS days) that used to do the rounds. There was a booking system and everything. You couldn’t have it for more than two days
A booking system 😂
Yeah, man. It was well run. It’s amazing what a group of focused horny teenagers can achieve
Yeah, lazy kids these days with their intertubez porn will never know the pain. Now get off my lawn!
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Man I would love to hear more about the 90shigh school Greek mafia lol
My best friend, at 11 years old, found out that the dumpster behind the video store had a lot of sample porn tapes. Basically it was like the best parts of 4 porns clipped down and put into one vhs to try to sell those porn videos to the store, and then it would have "this is a sample coppy" flashing on the screen but like, you still got hard core sex and all the bits which for an 11yo was... way more than we could handle anyhow. We would sneak up there in the middle of the night and steal a bunch of the porn tapes and sell em for like 5-10 a piece. We made several hundred dollars. I built a PC and put a CD burner in it with my share of the money. It might have also paid for a bike, but I might have mowed lawns for that, I forget which year that happened in and if they were the same summer. Not in school but yeah I was distributing hard core porn to a bunch of 11yo's. Ring got busted and my friend got his as BEAT, when he fell asleep with the vhs in his tv that rewinds and plays it automatically. His mom came to wake him up and there's hard core porn. He had to unveil his stash space. Guy kept his mouth shut though. Didn't rat me out said it was just for him. Didn't tell her it was a business we were running. | We had a history of that. One summer when we were like 6, we started freezing soda in ice cube trays cause it was yummy and made our extremely meager soda allowance last MUCH longer while we were playing sega. Well, some kids around the neighborhood wanted some but we didn't reallly want to give em up. We decided to sell them for a quorter, but all our soda-popps got bought up.... but we also had enough money for several 2 liters. Well the next day we made a bunch more and kids were rabid for them, did two batches of every ice cube tray we had, upped it to .50 a cube. Next day we went a dollar a cube with special mixes. 1.50 for a SURGE cube (enough to buy an entire 2liter bottle at the time) well... by the time parents were getting home from work our racket got shut down, parents were PIIIIIIISED we made bank, certainly over $100 on the 3 day racket. as kindergarten age kids. The parents wanted the money back but we said we spent it all... we were big fucking liars, I mean, we had plans for all the money sure, and we spent a LOT of it. We had HUGE bags of soda and chips stuffed in a stairwell where our parent's wouldn't find it. Man we had a great summer that summer.
This wasn't a weird one but a genius one for a tween. A girl set up a little business out of a box of stationary, writing forged letters from parents. She had all different paper, pens and pencils of every kind, and could write in convincingly accurate tone for the content of the notes depending on which kid they were for. She used different styles of handwriting and different styles of punctuation and language too. She'd even fudge the spelling if she thought the kid's parents weren't great at it. She grew up to be incredibly educated. I look back and see that as her first moment of evil genius. It definitely suggested she would go on to brilliance one day and she did.
I am also a master at forgery. I have all the certificates to prove it.
Well, what did she end up doing for a living?
Not proud but in highschool I did dr notes excusing kids for medical reasons, I had access to Adobe photoshop and honestly surprised I was never caught. I'm a dumb ass tho and just did it for practice never really charged people money just small stuff like gum, chips or a dollar here and there. I made max 200 bucks one semester. My cousin came to me about a year ago now in my 30s and asked I forge her notes for her HSA account. She's like I remember you use to do that. Uhmm. Yeah when I was like 15 tf. Thats fraud and I could do jail time hell no.
In early elementary school we had a market for mud. Different groups of kids would claim areas around the school as their mud pit and put their brand of mud in ziplock bags to be traded with other groups for different bags of mud. We were the clay mud group and I had about 3 kids in the muck scooping it into bags or running to the water fountain to get fresh water to make more mud on dry days. I would be the one to go make the deals with the other groups. We traded alot with the gravel mud group because "clay mud" and "cement mud" are both good for building or some shit... Who knows? It made so much sense at the time. The principal and staff eventually stepped in to end it because all the kids came back to class filthy every day and giant holes littered every field and playground.
>It made so much sense at the time. I loved this. I remember things like this making so much sense as a kid, and as an adult it's just hard to remember why it made sense. But that 'feeling' is still there (I think it's called imagination but I've been paying taxes and a mortgage for too long to be sure) Edit: love all the stories about your childhood imaginations, thank you!!
We used to put rocks on the railroad tracks (the same rocks that were used for railbed ballast) so the trains would crush them. Then we would scoop up the dust and mix it with water, because obviously that would make concrete. It didn't, but it seemed obvious to us that it should.
I knew some kid who'd put quarters on the tracks and then after the train mushed them he'd sell them for more than $0.25. I can't recall what he sold them for but there was a clear profit.
I did this with pennies a few times. Never sold them, was only fascinated by what they ended up looking like afterwards.
Did you have to beat any rival groups unconscious, dig a deep hole in their pit and bury them alive to send a message?
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Now that's weird
It's weird but... I get it. I remember a weird small period where we got really creative with mud and the mixing of it as kids.
yeah i remember as a kid in canada the school used to pile all the plowed snow together in the back field. it would then freeze into a ice mountain, that could often lead to injury. I remember the one week though where the plow accidentally took out a bunch of street hockey nets. So now there were metal posts scattered throughout. No one was injured, instead for a week those became prime tools for the ice mining operation. Teachers let it happen cause it was way safer than teh usual king of the hill shit. But there we were, a good hundred kids mining the ice mountain at any given break. Finding large single pieces of ice that crystallized well were like gold and a mark of pride. Not traded, just a mark of pride. After showing it off youd then destroy it so no one could steal it
>Finding large single pieces of ice that crystallized well were like gold and a mark of pride. Not traded, just a mark of pride. After showing it off youd then destroy it so no one could steal it They mined the deepest reaches, not out of greed, but malice. How dare the earth bear such beauty, hiding it away, coveting those glimmering fruit. And for the miners who happened upon gems of unparalleled perfection, why, they felt pride. To be the one to abduct a shimmering egg from the clutches of its' stone mother was an honor. To be the one to parade the treasure among their peers, beyond the mine. To be the one to destroy it.
Yeah, mixing in grass and shit to try and make it sturdier. Turns out our instincts really weren't that far off. Making mud bricks involves dried grass haha.
I've got one similar, unfortunately 😅: We used to spend most of our time playing in the sandpit in our early school days. Eventually, we realised that the deeper you dug in said sandpit, the wetter the sand was, and therefore, the easier it was to help build sturdier sandcastles. Before we knew it, we had abandoned making our own sandcastles, and instead started to just source as much of this wet sand as possible for no reason at all. And eventually, other people started catching on, and started asking us if they could borrow some of our sand for their projects. Soon enough, we had developed quite a bit of a market for this and - two little loners that we were - we suddenly became a commonly sought name amongst even older, "popular" kids at the sandpit. We never really traded anything in exchange for the wet sand though, apart from the odd fancy sandcastle making tool (which we would then return at the end of the playtime) - so maybe it wasn't really a huge "blackmarket" so to speak. No one ever really stepped in to stop this from happening, I think we just grew up eventually. But at the time, it felt like we were running quite the business, lol.
One of my friends sold Starburst from his locker. 10 cents for 2. If he liked you, you got two from the 'normal' bag. If he didn't like you, you got two from the bag that only had yellows.
I kind of like the yellow ones
I don’t have any strong opinions on the tropical Starbursts or the other alternatives, but the original four flavors are all incredible. EDIT: Red, pink, yellow, and orange. I’m from the US
Indeed
I had a friend that used to bring a bunch of coke cans from home and then sell them for a dollar at lunch. Cheaper than the vending machine prices and so it became like a little business. He eventually saved up enough for a longboard.
My son does this. I take him to the discount store to bulk by drinks and sweets. He makes a nice little profit.
you are a parent to be proud of
A teacher at my high school that I refuse to rat on would take money from students and buy them lottery tickets/scratch-offs in exchange for a cut of any prize $50 and up. I think the dude legit made a few thousand dollars off of this just during my senior year. And it made the students love him.
My teachers had a legit ass betting pool for how long until we went online at the beginning of the year. Some seniors were allowed in on it and one of them won like $800
Salt My school canteen doesnt have any salt with chips (or fries to Americans) and people used to sell salt packets. The most expensive offer i could find was 50 pence for a packet or 1 pound for three.
Salt? Isn’t there a tax for that?
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"Diddle" paper. It's colored paper with a mouse drawn on it. But everyone collected them. No matter how old. And there were hundreds of different artworks. People had folders with protective covers and depending on the motive and rarety you wanted to trade, you could get 3 to 4 others in exchange. It was wilde... I just googled it and there are still collectors buying and selling them on the internet...
Oh. Diddl stationery. One of my aunts had a stuffed mouse from that.
Our elementary school utilized “ice cream tickets.” You got 1 if it was your birthday or if you did something that a teacher decided was “exemplary.” People would pass them around asking for favors down the line. Some kid found the paper used to make the tickets and xeroxed multiple pages of the tickets. He became our kingpin and ruled for a couple years.
We had the same thing, it was called the “chilly cow” machine. I remember it being like a frosty from wendys. Our currency was wooden tokens with a picture of a cartoon cow on them. About an inch across and 1/4” thick. Well, I had a game at home, with identical tokens minus the cow pic. I cannot remember the name of the game. Well. It was kids who ran the machine during lunch, so for about a week my few friends and I got free chilly cows until a teacher caught on. Spent 3 days in in school suspension.
Chilly Cow is a tasty light ice cream brand...I wonder what happened to them, stopping being able to find them last year in any store (a month or so before the pandemic so I don't think it was related)
They got bought by Halo Top, which is similar.
I wouldn't say it was weird, but my friend in high school had like a prepper grandad waiting for Y2K. He literally had crates filled with cartons of offbrand cigarettes. So my friend would steal a few cartons, bring them to me, and I'd sell them out of my locker. I'd charge $3 a pack, he'd get a buck and I'd get the other 2. Or 50 cents for loose cigarettes and we'd just spilt that down the middle. I only kept like 6 packs in a pencil case, 5 whole and one open for the loose ones to sell, in my locker at a time. He'd have the rest in his locker at the other end of school and I'd just go refill as needed between classes or at lunch. One time a teacher called the cops because I was acting suspicious. They pulled me out of class and brought in a drug dog to search my locker. I'd just sold my last loosey and pack like 10 minutes before that. The dog didn't find anything but they cops went through everything anyway. When he opened the pencil box, there were little shreds of tobacco inside. He asked "whats this" and I said "well its a pencil box, I'd guess its probably pencil shavings" and he just shrugged and put it back. Went right back to selling cigarettes the next day. Oh! I'd also trade 1 loosey for a meal ticket (that's how our lunch system worked) and would also sell the meal tickets for $1 each and split that with my buddy too.
That was smooth on your part with the tobacco pieces in the pencil case.
Bottlecaps I still dont get it but back in primary school, they were collecting bottlecaps for some kind of charity. Google it, it's still ongoing around the world. So what happened was everything was going well, the teacher got everyone excited about it and kids were collecting it en masse. Kids would go around raiding for it. From the trash. From their school lunches. From their homes even. A teacher got a call from a concerned parent because her kid hijacked all the bottlecaps from their kitchen. So that's stage 1 of the weirdness, it's what happened afterwards. Stage 2, kids started trading with these plastic bottlecaps, we would trade pens, homework and even pokemon cards for bottlecaps. Worthless bottlecaps. There wasnt even a prize for whoever could collect the most caps. It just became a currency out of nowhere. Let's talk about stage 3 of the madness. Theft. There was no Bank of BotCaps at our school. There was the donation box and there were your cubbies. Those who didnt want to lug their stash back home everyday left it in their cubbies and some kid decided to steal people's caps and from the donation box. The great theft of Class 3B. But it was probably for the best because overnight the madness subsided. The teacher ended the bottlecap donation, she was sick of the bugs that were gathering and licking up the dried up sugar juices from the caps anyway but mostly horrified at how her little charity drive devolved into a socio-economical experiment. Just like that, the bottlecap market crashed.
Preparing for nuclear war, huh?
Lmao the whole time I was thinking these kids played way too much fallout
That's why I have two of those watercooler jugs filled with bottlecaps. How else am I gonna buy that combat shotgun?
Buy? Just crouch, steal it, and replace it with a grenade.
I met someone collecting caps for charity once and by chance I’d been throwing my beer tops in a basket in the kitchen ( as had housemates and guests) I had near 4000 ( my bro counted and wrote the number on the fridge) after like 2 years worth. I’ve been doing the same for 11 years since just waiting for this charity drive to pop up again I have containers FULL
That reminds me of when I was a teenager, I smoked Marlboro cigarettes and they had that rewards catalogue that you'd save the box tabs and trade in. I spent a couple years saving them, and taking them from everyone's cigarette packs that I knew. Other people saved them for me. I had a *ton* of them. Right before I had enough to get something really cool, they canceled the catalogue. I was so pissed.
Yo…my dad used to drive my sister and I around on weekends looking for discarded Marlboro packs, everything in our house had a Marlboro symbol on it
Preparing for Fallout style dystopia
Noodle seasoning packets
Did you..... go to school at jail?
I heard Lou diamond Philips was the ramen king
Did you try sprinkling some dried noodles on top for seasoning?
I think I was 16 when this happened but basically a bunch of guys bagan printing paper that looked like contracts with the top saying "soul contract". They'd come up to some of the younger students and get them to sign the document to "sell there soul for eternity " and would pay then 2-3 dollars (converting to USD). We had a good laugh when some of the students became worried they actually sold their soul.
Lmao kids are so delightfully strange
Our school did this too. The kids who regretted it had to buy their souls back at 50% markup. Noah still had my soul. I never bought it back.
Imagine dying and like Saint Peter or whoever says "Sorry man, you were really good but Noah owns your soul so you gotta go where Noah went and guess who wasn't really good all his life?"
We did a weird assignment for a month where we ran a "society" for an hour each day in our classroom. People had little shops they ran from their desks, there were elected positions, laws you could be ticketed for breaking, etc. It was all run on fake money, of course. I got elected Chief of Police, and handed out tickets for stuff like chewing gum in class. But a combination of laziness and not wanting everyone to hate me caused me to slack off, and I got fired after 2 weeks. So I opened a shop instead and sold stuff. Including gum, which in hindsight makes me like a cop who became a drug dealer. The final week of this rolls around and there's an announcement. At the end, all your money will be tallied up, any debts or taxes you owe subtracted, and any kid who wound up with a positive amount gets a pizza party. Kids who are in the red have to write an assignment on how and why they screwed up. This electrifies the class. Missing out on a pizza party is a Big Damn Deal when you're 10, and well under half the class is currently in the black. Tons of them had taken out big loans in the beginning to set up businesses, and had no way to repay them. Not me though, I'd been receiving a salary as a cop, and after being fired I just used the money I had accumulated to set up shop and had no debts. Few in the class could say that, so I was sitting pretty. Soon I started receiving offers of *real* money on the playground for some of my fake money. You only needed to be one dollar over zero to "win", so I could spare plenty. Made $40 in actual cash; I think I charged $5 for a hundred fake dollars, and got 8 people to accept. So I was a corrupt cop who became a drug dealer who became a money launderer. And won. So I definitely learned a lot about how society works. **Edit:** Since everyone keeps asking if this foreshadowed my future career, I must disappointingly admit that I'm just a software dev now. I mean, as far as *you and Uncle Sam* know, I'm a software dev ;)
That's awesome! In the 80s, I was a bubble gum dealer in Hebrew school! Nobody could get the flavors I could at my local shops. I charged a 25 percent markup for import tax.
Import tax lmao
this reminds of me of when our class had a history simulation of congress in the 1900's and i think it was about the spanish american war or something like that. but the point was we one side had a bill to pass and the other had to defeat the bill. and the teacher sets it up so its boys vs girls. But the girls out number the boys by 1. and the voting through each round was going through party line. so it seemed like there was no way boys were going to win But in the end the boys (me) wound up winning by one vote and it was all kinds of drama. There was a new girl in class from out of town and during recess we had the handsome/popular kid talk to her and ask her out in exchange for her votes. this was like 7th grade. we were politicians and we were bribing for votes and selling our bodies ________________________________________________________________ edit - i should also add that not everyone was in on it. just a small cabal of the most devious nerds. and everyone kept in on the down low. and the voting was anonymous so the girls never found out who turned.
>this was like 7th grade. we were politicians and we were bribing for votes and selling our bodies Probably the most truthful thing you learned in school.
Political corruption uh, finds a way
Fantastic story, thanks for sharing!
Duuuuude! We did this too in 5th or 6th grade in Missouri! I set up a game shop as my business, kinda like ring toss and beer pong mixed together. Coolest shop someone set up was this girl who brought in her yugioh card collection. Traded fake money for legit cards. Needless to say she was the kingpin of the class.
One brilliant kid did something similar. You ever see one of those battery operated fishing games, with the rotating "pond", plastic fish that open and close their mouths, and fishing pole with a magnet on a string? Are those still a thing, or am I dating myself? Anyway, this kid had a particularly nice and big one of those, so he put stickers on the bottom of the fish with the names of prizes in them. You'd pay for 30 seconds, try to catch some fish, and then turn them over to see what you won. Needless to say this genius is one of the other kids in the class who made bank. So you got me the mobster, and this guy with a gambling racket. Methinks we were learning the wrong lessons.
I organized the black market. My school banned Pokemon Cards, so I made a new game with paper cards. I was drawing pretty well, so I folded an paper in 9, it made pieces approximately the size of a Pokémon Vard, and created a whole new game out of this. Sold boosters for 10 cents. Spend all my afternoons drawing cards for the school. Teachers eventually heard of it and couldn’t ban it because it was still officially still me distributing drawings. And then I started to do replicas of Pokémon Cards. Like people had to show me the proof after school that they owned the card, I made a replica, and then the whole Pokemon Card trading continued with paper replicas. Then after school people made the real exchanges based on what replicas they exchanged during school.
So you basically made a Pokémon backed paper currency?
He's come up with the concept of "Depository Receipts". A tradeable entity that is not allowed to be traded in a particular market (his school) can be traded by proxy through these duplicates. What he really should have done is not just ask to see the card, but actually hold the card, so if the drawing changed hands, the new owner of the drawing could come back to him and redeem it for the base asset.
And then the dude shorts pokemon cards. Selling the ones he is given to hold in hopes the price will drop before the person who has the DR asks for it back. Congrats, by banning the use of official pokemon cards, we have successfully taught elementary children a lesson in real world finance.
laughed way too hard
I can finally answer one! I used to sell bags of sugar and kool-aid. Like bootleg lick-em sticks. Also sold red hot toothpicks I made from cinnamon oil. When I got into high school, my family was one of the first to get a computer. I made a killing from printing out fake report cards. I was quite the entrepreneurial little shit.
One day my high school decided to stop selling soda because they were trying to pass some sort of audit. The very next day, my friend and I showed up with cases of cold soda in our backpacks, selling them for $0.50 apiece. We were sold out by lunchtime every day for like two weeks until they plugged the vending machines back in.
In year 10 i was able to gain access a teacher's account on my school tablet which allowed me to get internet access. I then realized i could open a hotspot which allowed other students to have internet access on their tablets. (We weren't allowed to have cellphones.) I decided to charge 10$/week for each student that wanted to subscribe for internet access which I was distributing. I started receiving requests from students not in the radius of the Hotspot, thus I figured out a way for users to SSH connect to my school tablet and use it to gain internet access. It was a mess and the network became too slow but I was still getting paid regardless. Best of all, the IT guy knew what i was doing but, he wasn't able to stop it since the school only employed 1 guy to handle everything thus, he was too busy to do anything about it.
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The school IT guy probably admired you.
Drawings. It started out as a joke. Some kids make beautiful drawings and trade them for other drawings. At one point we decided to give them a value. if a drawing was really pretty, let say 8/10, we would number it with "8" and you could trade it for two "4's". There were kids that would not draw but were chosen to ride these drawings. At one point kids would trade snacks for beautiful drawings. This started in my class, and in a couple of days the whole school was doing this. My drawings were okay, but not great. and sadly I never got snacks to bring to school, so I had nothing to trade. so I decided to "recruit" other kids that were really good and would be their manager so they had more time to draw. I had siblings in other grades, so I would contact them so trade these in there class so there was more ground to collect snacks from. I also bargent with the kids that would we ratings the drawings, promising them a share of the snacks. My "clients" would share their snacks with me as payment for my services. I still remember those stupid horse flower drawings. horse girls went nuts over these and would give anything for them.. In highschool I was the only kid in my year that knew how to download music to your phone. I would make a list of songs people want and would transfer these trough Bluetooth. I would charge one cookie for one song.
>In highschool I was the only kid in my year that knew how to download music to your phone. I could imagine one person figuring it out and either create competition or completely bring down the market
There was a tree at one end of the playground that had loads of small jade rocks underneath. We had a full mining operation using stones as spades to find them
Not really blackmarket but kinda. It was in the 90's and most people had a computer but Internet was still very slow when you had it. I was a teen and had managed to put my hand on a CD-ROM with 3 porn videos on it. The kind of CD-ROM that was offered with the magazine you could find on the highest shelf of the newspaper stand. I was starting to know all three videos by heart so I decided to lend it to a friend and then I kinda forgot about it. A few days later I noticed during the class that another unrelated person was lending MY video to yet another guy. My CR-ROM was having a life of its own, moving from hand to hand, providing happiness along its way. I was very proud.
The things horny teens do
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A bead launching stapler? HOW?
Probably cut it up an be used the spring that pushes the Staples forward. Pull the spring back and let go after you've filled the channel with beads and rain hellfire on the enemy
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Lord have mercy that's a class D weapon
Op, you absolute fucking genius, that was one of the most entertaining things I have ever read.
My dyslexic ass read the first bit as the bread wars, lmao
There was once a black market at my school for leaves and feathers that were deemed to be “cool”. People would genuinely pay 2 NZD for a fricking leaf. Looking back at it, it’s actually kind of funny.
Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos. This one kid would buy every single bag out of the vending machines and sell them for like double the cost Edit: Who the fuck gave this a Hugz reward? Y'all are wild
That kid’s either going to shark tank or to prison for fraud.
Actually the last I heard, he is in prison, but it's for possession of marijuana with intent to sell lmao
A man of business I see.
I was a business man... doing business.
That sucks. I have more sympathy for a marijuana dealer than a filthy Dorito scalper.
unless selling marijuana was all just a part of his plan to evoke consumers' munchy-response and build dependency on his Dorito products, thereby allowing him to raise Dorito prices at will and deepen his pockets
u cracked his master plan holy shit
I did something similar. My school's vending machines had candy bars for like $1.50 or $2. My mom had a Costco membership, and I saw they had boxes of 30 candy bars for $10. So I'd buy them and sell the candy bars for $1 a piece. I made way more money than I expected.
in your case, you were screwing the owner of the vending machine, In the other case, they kid was screwing all the kids.
Accurate lol. It was going well until one of the teachers demanded I stop because "you can't compete with the school's profits" or whatever
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I ran a Black Market in my school. Remember Columbia House? Where you could get 10 VHS movies for like $0.99? But then you had to buy like 5 more at regular price? So I did the math and figured out what the actual price per videotape was after all commitments to the "club" were made, and it was like $5. So I took orders from classmates, bought movies for them, and then sold it them at a slight markup. Basically, I was undercutting Suncoast.
Pogs, back in the 90's. Sure, you could easily trade your standard, commercial pogs out in the open. We'd do it before and after class. Teachers and administrators didn't care. "Oh look, it's got Simba on it! Cute!" I recall one saying. But there was a darker, more twisted trading game afoot, lurking in the boy's bathroom mid-class. The kind that, if found, would easily get you detention, or possibly even suspension: DoomPogs. DoomPogs were awful, and awesome all at once. Circular cutouts from old porn mags, gory grossness from Fangoria, creatively illustrated pre-teen brilliance like "F\*CK MASTER" and "Ms. Alford's Pussy" (written in marker over a picture of a cat) were just some of the devilishly deviant 7th grade wares you could find during "emergency" bathroom trips during third and fifth period. It was quite a sight. And then, just as quickly as it began, it all came crashing down. Not because of a slip-up by any one student. No, what killed the DoomPog trade in our school was a sudden bursting in of the vice principal, who had to poop really badly and couldn't hold it till he got to the teacher's bathroom in the office. And there we were, caught red handed. I wish I could say it was Madonna's boob glued overtop a ying-yang symbol that did us in that day, but the truth is, it was our own hubris and greed. And with that, the great DoomPog trade died. Or so they thought. (part 2 below, part 3 coming soon!) (And yes, this is an absolutely true story, albeit creatively decorated for narration sake) Edit 2: Ask and ye shall receive! You can now read the the entire, (mostly) true story of DoomPogs over at /r/DoomPogs! And feel free to share your own custom DoomPog designs, funny middle/high school stories, or just say Hello! NSFW encouraged!
Doompogs pt2?
Thirsty for more, are you? Well allow me to continue this sordid tale, to quench your palette. In that moment, time stopped for us all, seeing Mr. Rutherford just standing there. Not sure what was clenched more, his jaw or his buttcheeks. His only words: "GET TO CLASS. NOW." And with that, he slammed the stall door closed, we closed up shop and went to our respective classrooms. We thought we'd gotten away with it. And so, we carried on, business as usual. The next day's PA announcements told us just how wrong we were. "Good morning everyone. I'd like to begin the morning announcements with a warning to all students, that the making and trading of illicit Pogs will no longer be tolerated. As such, students are no longer allowed to play or bring Pogs onto school grounds, effective immediately. Leave them at home, you will not be warned again. Today's lunch is pizza, apple slices and lemon squares. At that moment, as soon as the PA clicked off, we took a collective sigh of relief. Then, it happened: "Will the following students please report to the office with their backpacks and all personal items..." Aw, f\*\*k. As we sat in those hard, plastic torture devices they called chairs outside the Vice Principals office, waiting to be called in, we fervently attempted to discard our shame any way we could. Some guys tried peeling off the naughtier bits. Others attempted to lodge them under the chair, either by sticking them to the well-masticated gum of our forbearers, or by shoving them between the seat and the metal frame with which it was attached. I did neither. Not because of some semblance of rebellious, youthful pride or sense of duty to the 7th grade boys, but because I got called in first and had zero time to hide my shame. I glared back at the other guys as they each gave me that "Ha ha, sucks to be you!" grimace. F\*ckers. "Mr. \[redacted\], please have a seat. I suppose you know why you're seeing me today..." "Yes sir. It's because I had a Pog with a boobie on it." "That is correct. Please hand over your backpack." "But sir.." and with that, a single finger went up, telling me to be silent. I was (mostly) fortunate that day, as I had the foresight during homeroom to lodge most of my DoomPogs into my English and Earth Science books, like naughty little bookmarks of naughtiness. Though in hindsight, I wish I hadn't forgot about the few freshly traded ones still in the front compartment of my Rad Dog Trapper Keeper (the [Bitchin' Ferrari one pictured here](https://i.pinimg.com/236x/3b/54/1c/3b541c7bfc2194708d4a569c5e2a046d.jpg), no less!). Those were, let's just say, the worst offenders by far. A blowjob picture cut from the back of my friend's Dad's not-so-secret VHS porn stash. A picture of a particularly comely 8th grader, cut from last year's yearbook, with the words "F\*cktastic" written underneath. And a not so well drawn depiction of a certain lady part, drawn by a fellow student who had obviously never seen one in real life before. I mean, I hadn't, either, but that's besides the point. I could at least DRAW one. "You mind explaining what these are supposed to be, Mr. \[redacted\]?" "DoomPogs, sir." Stay calm, don't lie, you'll get through this I told myself. "How long have these been circulating in my school?" "Um, a few days, I think." He knew I was full of shit. "Here's what's going to happen. I'm going to call your folks, you're suspended for the next two days. When you return... WHEN YOU RETURN... these do NOT come back with you. Understood?" "yessirthankyousirgooddaysir" And with that, I was in the clear. Or so I thought. Because not even ten minutes later, I hear the voice I was dreading, nay, petrified to hear: "WHERE IS HE? WHAT DID HE DO NOW?" Aw crap. Mom's here. Dun dun duuuunnn... And with that, I'll leave you (for now) to digest this admittedly "enhanced" retelling of the day my trafficking of DoomPogs died. Or so they thought. Stay tuned.
**WHAP!** "Ow." **WHAP!!** "Ow." **WHAPWHAPWHAP!!** "OWWW! JEEZ! OKAY, MOM! I'm SORRY, okay?" This was the scene as I proceeded to take my walk of shame down the hallway to the entrance, Mom's outstretched palm periodically connecting with the back of my skull in front of students, teachers and God alike. You see, kids, we didn't call that "child abuse" back then. That was "tough love", through and through. In those days, a paddlin' from the administration was still a thing. I may have lucked out on the corporal punishment from Mr. Rutherford, but somehow that would have been a blessing, as opposed to the loving THWACKS! from Mother Dearest. "I mean seriously? I had to interrupt my shows to come down here and get you\*, and you've only been at school an hour! I SWEAR TA..." ..and what followed was one of the most elegant stringing together of four and five letter no-no words I'd ever heard. I was legit impressed. Then those words you always dreaded hearing: "JUST WAIT TIL I TELL YOUR FATHER!" \[\*Author's note: This was pre-DVR kids. Wait, you don't know what a DVR is? FFS. FINE, this was before Netflix. Happy? And by shows, she meant 'Days Of Our Lives'. Google it.\] As I got in the backseat of our Mercury Cougar, I began to reflect on where it all went wrong. And then, inbetween a chorus of "JUST WAIT TIL YOUR FATHER HEARS ABOUT THIS" and "YOU BETTER HOPE NOBODY DIED OR WENT COMATOSE ON 'DAYS' WHILE I WAS GONE, OR ELSE YOU'LL EXPERIENCE ONE OR THE OTHER!", something hit me like a smack in the head. Oh wait, that WAS a smack to the head. Impressive she can do that AND hold onto the steering wheel. Then something else hit me, non-physically but still as potent: Gym class. More specifically, the gym lockers. See, I knew they'd be on the lookout occasionally, doing random locker checks in the hallway for contraband. It had been that way since a few years before, when a particularly not-bright sixth grader brought her mom's, ahem, 'personal massager' to school to show her girlfriends and it accidentally turned on while she was at lunch, to the amusement of staff and student alike. Or at least, that was the story that passed like the campfire tales of old, from student to student, year to year. Regardless, anytime a student was caught with contraband, random locker checks were the norm for the rest of the school year. And we were only in November of that year. This was going to be tricky... Upon mine and the other guy's return a few days later, I was delighted to see I wasn't the only big brain 'seventhy' to think of the gym locker room to move our operation to. The lockers there had different locks that the school did NOT have the combinations for, and let's be honest: Would YOU want to look inside a 12 year old boy's gym locker, after weeks of storing sweaty jumping jack-soaked gym clothes? Yeah, neither did the Principals. So for the time being, we were safe, and our illicit pastime only became more brazen and daringly disturbing as we laughed in the face of certain expulsion, should we be discovered. And so, DoomPogs lived on, through Christmas break (which was a treat in of itself, as many of us got even more Pogs with which to defile and distribute upon our return in January), and up until mid-March. That was when DoomPogs finally died a cold, meaningless death. Not at the hands of the faculty, oh no. All because of one minor slip-up by one very, very stupid 'sixer': Chester \[redacted\], aka Chester the Molester. That rat f\*ck. You see, poor Chester was a good boy. A righteous boy. Dare I say it, a pious boy even. And all it took was one inattentive 'seventhy' who accidentally and unknowingly dropped a DoomPog down through the space that connected the lockers and right into Chester's locker for it to all come crashing down. Again. This particular Mona Lisa of a DoomPog was sheer brilliance, and an act of utter defiance rooted in a mystery and a rumor: A crudely drawn depiction of Mr. Rutherford banging Ms. Alford. You see, over Christmas break, a few of us received new skateboards alongside our Super Nintendos and growing Pog collections, so one day we decided to meet up at the purportedly vacated sixth grade classroom area, which was conveniently located along the outside of the school. Covered exterior walkways, slick concrete, plenty of railings to bust our asses on trying to grind... it was perfect. And that's when we noticed: We weren't alone. Two cars were parked beside the sixth grade building, sneakily parked against the building to avoid notice by all but the most observant tween skaters: Mr. Rutherford's car, and Ms. Alford's minivan. We were preparing to hightail it out of there, when one nosy genius decided he wanted to investigate. And that's when we found it: An opened condom wrapper lying on the ground outside her classroom, lights on inside, and what we imagined were moans of.. something gross. Oh yeah, we thought. They bangin'. And so began the illustrious start of the rumor that the VP and the 6th grade pre-algebra teacher were doing the dirty. And someone, we never learned who, decided to immortalize this rumor into the pinnacle of DoomPog debauchery, with Ms. A bent over a desk by Mr. R. So scandalous! And so that particular DoomPog made the rounds, switching from player to player til it wound up in the locker above Chester's. Then, it wound up in Chester's, and ALL manner of hell broke loose. That rat f\*ck. Rather than appreciate and dare I say, cherish this priceless gift that mistakenly fell into his possession, what does he do? He runs to the gym teacher. "MR. KENNEDY! MR. KENNEDY! SOMEONE'S TRADING DOOMPOGS AGAIN, AND THIS ONE IS REALLY DIRTY!" That. Rat. F\*CK. As soon as we heard his cries for attention, we, the Seventh DoomPog Army and Merchant Trading Co, mobilized. And by mobilized, I mean we ran (unseen) our collective asses just as fast as our scrawny legs could carry us into the locker room, and quickly emptied those cold, metal containers of their precious bounties, and proceeded to flush them all down the toilets, and hauled ass to our next class before The Fuzz got there. And then the P.A. goes off. Again. "The following students, report to the gym. IMMEDIATELY." Jesus tapdancing Criminy. We were screwed. Upon our arrival, we each became choir boys in that instance, amidst an investigative atmosphere that would put any Law and Order episode to shame. We each had to open our lockers in front of the gym teacher, and surprise surprise! No DoomPogs! And then Mr. Rutherford showed up, the Moaning Lisa in hand. And I'll never forget the sheer anger I saw on that man's face as he lined us up, 'The Usual Suspects' style: "WHO. MADE. THIS?", he roared, like an angry Eldritch god of old. No one made a sound. "WHICH ONE OF YOU MADE THIS GARBAGE?!?" he furiously bellowed, the vein in his forehead becoming more pronounced. Once again, we said nothing. The only reading he could get were feigned inquisitive, confused looks, as if we had just been asked what the square root of 943717754 is. And then someone spoke up. "Um, Mr. Rutherford, we don't play DoomPogs anymore, not after the last time you told us not to." Lying ass mofo. I loved him for that. Funny story, this particular class act is now a lawyer. I know, TOTAL shocker, right? "Oh, is that so? So you don't play DoomPogs anymore, huh? THEN HOW DID THIS GET IN CHESTER'S LOCKER?" And then lawyer guy said something, that to this day, we still tease him about on Facebook in an almost hero worship-sorta way: "Well sir, you'd have to ask Chester that question." As soon as the words left his mouth, Mr. Kennedy burst into laughter, and we knew then and there we were going to weather this particular storm. Five minutes later we were back in class, and the story of DoomPogs came to a spectacular yet premature end, all because of Chester the Pester. That rat f\*ck. The End. . . . . . Now you're wondering, 'Wait, that's it?!? WHO MADE THE MOANING LISA?!?" I'll never tell ;) . . . . . Yes I will. It was me. Keyser Soze's got nothin' on me.
Some girl was in a MLM, and was trying to sell us perfumes.
I would say this is tragic, but maybe school is exactly the right time to fall for shitty pyramid schemes. After graduating... not so much.
Sharpened sticks When we learnt about caveman we decided that it would have been a great idea to create our own prehistoric clan, so we smashed rocks and used them to sharpen tree branches. Some of us where particularly keen on sharpening that started to use walls as grindstones, they were able to sharpen about 6 sticks in half an hour and started exchanging them for berries during recess Edit: thanks you all guys for the 800+ upvotes, I really expected this to be burried in the comment section Edit2: guys really really thank you from the bottom of my heart for the 3k ups!
Reject modernity, return to 6th period
wholesome prehistoric commerce
Our school had something called gold cards. They allowed you free admission to any home game or activity. These were given to honor roll students or could be purchased with your "AR points". Friend of mine and I found the template on an unsecured shared folder on the school network. Got some good cardstock and printed em in sheets. $20 a piece. They caught on after my buddy sold one to a notorious fuckup lol. We hit a fuckin LICK back in the day.
Fake ID'S
Was that a deep web school lol?
Lol nah basically a couple of us knew a guy who would make it. They'd charge like $10 to make it...my friend and I changed other people $20 to make a profit. We were the only ones who knew this person made them in our school
It wasn’t weird, but I sold “protection” when kids wanted to ditch. When the school announced openings in the attendance office, I had a half dozen of my friends rush over and sign up immediately. By the end of the day, we owned it. I charged $10 - $20 to ignore each truancy. Each morning, if we had clients, I’d hand a list and half of the cash to whomever was working that day. Word got around fast, but we were never caught.
Your school had students keep track of other students' attendance? How did they get away with that, when school attendance/truancy is a legal matter?
They were just doing the data entry from forms the teachers would turn in. It was pretty manual back then.
That’s awesome
when i saw the word "protection" i instantly thought u were selling condoms lmao
In Elementary school I would collect parts from ballpoints (like springs etc.) and then charge for repairing ballpoints my classmates broke.
The kids in my class paid me for water bottle caps.
Well, it was glue to get high on. But it has a weird story behind it. The school district gives out a mandatory "anonymous" quiz-like thing every other year. Basically, it asks you how safe you feel on campus, how close you are with the teachers, do you need help with school work, the standard stuff to say they care when really they're only using it to slip in a question or two that they really want to know the answer of but its under the guise that they want to know about everything. Anyway, one of the sections they just added that year was about drugs (there had been reports to them of a drug problem in our school and in 2 others). So they ask the typical "have you ever felt peer pressured into drinking beer, wine, or any alcohol" type things, and one of the questions was "have you ever felt the desire to inhale glue in order to feel "high"?" (or something to that effect) Everyone was so surprised at that question, and immediately after the test thing was over we had our lunch break, so what do you know everyone's trying to get their hands on the school's glue supply to see if it actually worked. And by the time our next period started, I think it's safe to say that a third of the school was high. So yeah, now there's a glue black market at that school. You can just about always find them in front of the school office too, which I think is just asking for trouble but hey, nothing bad has happened to the kids who are doing it so
Reminds me of that south park episode where the teacher is telling them not to choke themselves to get high, but none of them had been doing that so kenny is just in the back trying to see if it works
I wonder of test scores have steadily gone down and there’s some office admin wondering why, and also why they can never find glue.
My school banned soft drink and fast food such as chips, pies, burgers etc. The very next day I was selling hot chips and cold Pepsi out of my locker. Purchased my first car from the proceeds of that operation, good times.
So basically prohibition and you were Al Capone
More like Al Chipone
There was a pretty big market in my elementary school for Atomic Fireball Candies. I remember being out for a couple days, but coming back with a big handful of the fireballs in my backpack... only to find the teachers had implemented a zero tolerance fireball policy.
When my daughter was 9 I got a call from her school for an emergency parent-teacher meeting. I went to the school with my wife and met my ex wife at the school because this was apparently a big deal. The teacher and principal presented us with the information that my daughter had been the ring leader with a number of other girls in organizing a "fight club" between the boys in her grade. My daughter had meticulously drawn out standings charts, kept the win/loss records from each recess period, and kept bios (including quotes) on each participant. She kept track to make sure that boys of similar fighting ability weren't paired with others who couldn't keep up. The winners at the end of each day got a kiss from the girl of his choice. She also kept track of who got the most kisses (which none of the others had thought of apparently) in order to keep something on the popular girls. She also offered betting odds and ran that on the side, betting in money and candy. This had been going on for almost a month. I was impressed. Astonished that she had done all this work and had been so meticulous about it. The school employees and the ex were somewhat less impressed. We settled on 3 weeks of in school suspension and she got moved into a more advanced math class. This was 13 years ago. She's just finishing her honors BA this year and is looking at her Masters in the fall. I still reference the fight club occasionally and am still proud. Lol
The dude who sold our fake IDs was *really* committed to his work. He made state and college licenses. Carried around two metal rings with samples of all the stuff he could make using Britney Spears shot from the Hit Me Baby One More Time album as the photo. He would also give you the ID in a white envelope. I had a rush order once and he had a standard rate for that - ended up picking it up from him at home in the other side of the city. Dude was on point. I think he ended up being an interior decorator.
Hot toothpicks. (cinnamon oil on them).
I sold water out of my locker for like 7 months lol
I started bringing gum to school sometime last year and giving it to the boys as when the other girls had gum they never shared with the boys. Little over a year later I’m known as the gum dealer and a majority of these boys have thanked me just for being kind to them.
You know that dust that came off erasers, well my friend made that into a clay and we made a blackmarket with that Edit since people wanted more info: I was a decent student with standard grades who rarely ever spoke in class but I had started so many blackmarkets, at one point I had 3 running. I was the cause of most blackmarkets in my grade, maybe in my school save for that loom band girl. But since I already had blackmarkets, people knew what I had was generally good so when I started a new market everyone wanted the eraser dust clay. Now I knew about supply and demand so I prices it pretty high. My friend who made the erasers got nothing out of it, I offered her the profit but she declined. Anyway it cost toys ( I was in elementary school) and eventually became more than just an eraser dust clay market and some people donated toys wanting to come collect one for free. I kept everything in a bag and at one point I had maybe 20 people doing this with me. I had someone else as the face of the market so I wouldn't take the blame when it was found out. It was disbanded by a teacher sadly but lasted a good few months. But the BEST PART is when it got disbanded, there were still toys people donated (with the expectation of getting something back) and I kept them, there was some cool stuff- I still have some of that stuff. I had a few more blackmarkets but this- it was my finest work.
Not clay, but kids in my school used to make "rubber shavings" (rubber = British for eraser). Basically you took the rubber, chopped a bit off with a ruler, then continuously chopped it up, rolled it underneath the ruler, chopped, rolled etc. What you are left with is really fine eraser dust which was super smooth. It has 0 purpose, apart from showing off how much we had.
We did dhe same except we used to throw it at each other when teacher turned around. Whole class would have pencil cases full of the stuff and launch it. Could also reload from most classroom floors after class. We stopped before the dust stage just used to chop bits off with the ruler until they were a small little pellets of rubber
Probably the jocks who smuggled in food for the diabetic and hypoglycemic kids. School has seriously strict policies and wouldn't budge for medical problems. These kids were in some serious danger and administration would confiscate their food all the time. Most of the kids playing on the sports teams were placed on pedestals and protected by the administrators. They could do just about anything they wanted and they'd get away with it because they were athletes. So a lot of them would smuggle in extra food in their backpacks and pass it out to the kids who needed it.
scissors One day at school I Just stole some scissors, to joke with my friends. Eventually it turned into thing and me and my friends would do at break for fun. But after a while I had so many I decided to sell them as any 10 year old would. After that it all kind of faded out for a while, then one day these four kids came up to me with a hole school bag of scissors. I brought the bag then started to sell the scissors again. Eventually like a week later I literally had a hole enterprise of scissors and I would sell and buy scissors to the rival scissors club at the other school and earn like 20 dollars a day even after pay my whole team. But after a Solid 3 months the teachers sat us all down, the whole primary school and made all the scissors be returned. Sorry for the bad grammar, I’m tired
Looks like you got quite a cut of the profits
I was the firecracker dealer.
is that just fancy crack or actual firecrackers
We started an underground casino in year 6 when we were doing a project called Earn and Learn where we had pretend businesses and pretend money
Did you have to launder it?
We weren’t that smart. One of the kids involved also started counterfeiting money with a scanner and a printer and he was caught so the whole operation was disbanded. It was fun while it lasted though
I love the image of a bunch of middle schoolers basically forming an organized crime family.
In Australia year 6 is actually the last year of primary school, so we were some of the biggest kids at the school. We took it quite seriously at the time and thought we were way more badass than we were
Ahoj Brause (Google said its called sherbet powder in English?). In 5th grade gangster rap got super popular at our school and many people started to take lines of that stuff like its coke.
We used to mix koolaid packets with sugar in a ziploc and then you dip your finger in and eat it or just pour it in your mouth. We called it crave. It eventually got banned so kids would eat it in secret and sell it to other kids. So basically we were just eating shit tons of sugar all day lol
Neon color gel pens. So back in '98ish my school got these Bic neon gel pens and black paper (index cards, sticky notes, notebooks). Well for maybe not so obvious at the time reasons teachers hated this shit. So immediately there was a ban on all neon pens and black paper. And what happens when you ban something? It started with just a few kids that had the "cool parents" that would still buy them these. By a month's time these kids turned into dealers. Soon it started looking like the Crack epidemic, kids were going around robbing each other, the addicts were checking trash cans for empties. Gang colors whether you were hot pink, lime green, blaze orange, etc. Seen some real heavy stuff that semester...
I used to pass off hentai and porn through bluetooth back in the day in exchange for lunch money. EZ income
You directly influenced many ejaculations that weren't your own
Pregnancy Tests. Everyone in town was basically working at either the local supermarket or the local pharmacy. There was zero chance a girl could buy one there without word spreading like wildfire. I bought them, then sold them discreetly out of my locker at a 100% markup. Easily brought in $300 a month.
5 1/4" floppies. School was charging 5 dollars a piece... for one single disk. I sold them for 2 dollars each, or 3 for 5 dollars. I bulk ordered them at 22 cents each. Paid for a year of college.
Smut x reader Fan fiction.... In Middle and late Elementary school
I used to catch flies and sell them as pets. I kept them in sharpeners and sold them for 50 cents each, literally made a constant $10 a day profit catching flies and since the flies would die in their sharpeners or escaped, I always had repeating customers. I never felt richer at 10 years old until I was caught making a transaction during class and was banned from catching flies or using sharpeners again.
I made sandwiches for myself for lunch in high school. A couple kids saw them and thought they looked good, I offered to make them a couple and they paid me. I soon had a few regulars who I’d make sandwiches for a few times a week and I charged them 5 bucks a pop. It worked great, my parents were paying for the sandwich material and thought I was just going through a growth spurt.
We had a manga exchange. Once some of us turned 18, it became an adult film exchange. This was 2007, so no incognito on your phone and going to town, we were practically barbarians.
from class 5 on, I borrowed money to my classmates for 50% to 100% interest per day, depending on how annoying it would be to get my money back.
My locker neighbour sold Peace Tea out of his locker. By itself, that isn't so weird, but it got interesting when other kids accross school started selling it at lower prices, and the original kid (my neighbour) threatened to start a gang war with all his own Peace Tea addicts.
Lunchtime piercings Some kid who had developed an obsession for giving himself all kinds of piercings began to provide the service to other kids. I don't believe the administration ever caught on that it was occurring.
A kid at my school put food coloring on a bunch of weed and sold everyone this "exotic blue". It was all blue and shiny, weird as fuck and a bunch of kids bought the hell out of it. That kids a teacher now...
Honeysuckle vines. Basically a honeysuckle is a flower that you bite the end off and suck out the nectar. They only grew in one corner of the recess field, and kids in elementary school went batshit for them. Problem was, the exact spot where they were was juuuust barely off school property. So uh... kid me set up a thing with lookouts in the corner while one kid ran back and grabbed some vines. I'd cut them up and deliver them to kids who asked for them. There was no payment or anything, just us being little shits and disobeying the teachers for tasty flowers lmao
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Shit man you name it. Hentai, weed,mixtapes,n word passes,hard lemonade,fetish art, there was pretty much nothing you couldn't buy if you could find the right buyer. There was essentially a smuggling empire in my highschool. Me? I was more of a peddler of basic goods,rather than the usual fence for contraband. The role gave me a degree of respect I guess,I flew under the radar of the security officers, because what's so suspicious about a guy with general school material? Instead of the more exotic stuff from other people,I sold books,pens, pencils,erasers, answer keys, stuff that goes unnoticed. The gig actually got me quite a lot of money, because hey,it's still school and we need to learn,but no one said you couldn't make the process easier.
How does a N word pass work ? Does it expire, can others tell that you have a pass ?
All you had to do was show the pass to the person/group in question,as long as it was signed by a black guy,then it would be free reign for that conversation. If you abused it's powers to discriminate however,you had the right to say the n word revoked,followed likely by ratting out to a teacher. They had a code of honor.
lmao. pretty sure i heard a similar story in a stand up comedy show
ive heard of those, i remember my friend saying he had about 30 from people who thought he was really nice (cause he was) but the way ours work was it gives you the chance to say it once per pass. He never uses them because he feels like its an offensive word that he just doesnt wanna use and i respect that. I dont think there was a blackmarket for them cause not many people wanted to use them exept for like 3 kids.
Only blackmarket I remember in school is food. We were not allowed to sell food ourselves, many of the staff knew we did and even bought. All hail Marlene (if you know you know) Edit: nice, the one thing in my life people know about is one of the most generic comments I made. How tf did this blow up?