Good Business Tips learned During Co-op

A truly memorable party comes but once a lifetime. The kind of party that opens your eyes to the nuances of strangers, the sense of humour of the humourless and the drinking habits of the elderly. Unfortunately, this party wasn't it.

Anyway, during one of these little shindigs I was introduced to two entrepreneurs trying to make it in this cockeyed world. They were a contrast in styles. That was pretty clear. And after all was said and done, one savoured the sweet smell of success while the other chewed the bitter pills of defeat. Here's their abridged story:

I was mingling, exchanging witty banter with the guests, who were mostly U of T engineers. Well, there was one particularly alluring femme, who enjoyed programming in Turing, while assuring me that was not all she enjoyed. Hey, that sentence rhymes, in a dopey sort of way.

A fairly meaty character approached with a paper bag stapled to his belly. So I quipped, "Hey, is that bag open for tips after you give us a belly dance?" That was funny so people laughed. He ambled towards me unfazed by the mockery. So I look into the bag and notice finely packaged brownies. He says, "Free samples, and if you like it, 5 bucks each." They were expensive brownies but I figure when in Rome ... So I sampled the stuff, and bought 5. Tasty. It turned out he owned a brownie farm and baked the stuff hydroponically.

By shrewdly using age-old marketing techniques, combined with the laws of supply and demand, he transformed a belly-stapled bag of brownies into a $300 enterprise. With that kind of dough, he can elope and marry Juana, a prison guard he met in the joint. And find that pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Now we move to the other sap.

This dude bought a keg of orange juice and planned to charge people $10 for the night (on account of its nutritional goodness). But this guy drinks too much of the stuff before anyone shows up so he's just in a Vitamin C high singin' show tunes and whatnot. When the guests eventually show, they're givin' him loonies, twoonies, pesos, those chocolate coins, pieces of toilet paper, and this guy thinks he's makin' a fortune. Consequently we all receive subsidized orange juice.

When Keg-boy recovered from his little tryst with the orange juice gods, I confronted him and pointed out such gross financial mishandling, you know, so that he learns. At which point he curses me out in front of my peeps. At which point I start beating myself up, like that crazy white dude in Fight Club, 'cuz I ain't messing with no 6-foot-4 dude with a tooth stuck in his forehead. I never figured out how he got that tooth stuck in his forehead. But that's another story for another day.

Keg-boy was out $250 while his counterpart, "The Brownie" netted $250. They both had visions of grandeur, but only one realized it, while the other woke up with a really bad hangover and a tooth stuck in his forehead. So the moral of the story? It's really tough to smoke a brownie no matter how finely you grind it.

Heramb Ramachandran