In the aftermath of nearly being scammed out of nine thousand dollars, I thought to myself, Wow, maybe this will be my post calvin post for the month. Got an action packed story for once! But unlike Noah’s harrowing caper, my hell of my own making mostly consisted of me spending five hours on the phone with people who genuinely responded “ten-four” to convince me they were the police and me definitely paying for all the street parking I did during my journey to stop at every bank in Downtown Detroit. Unfortunately, it’s a story more likely to earn me advice about how I should spot scams (advice I already know) than a spot on the most popular tpc posts.
I failed many times over the last month, the scam being the titular one. I ran over a curb getting into a gas station and then realized a hundred miles away from home that something on my car was rattling, but I couldn’t diagnose what. The internet locked eleventh graders out of their required state testings for over an hour. I checked my phone one afternoon to see multiple DMs letting me know that someone was accusing me of being a rape apologist on Twitter. I lost one of the plushies that I special-ordered from Japan a few months ago as a gift to myself (Meiko is somewhere on the streets of Detroit, dirty and alone). When I went back home for the Easter weekend, chives all over my front lawn greeted me—a gift from myself four years ago who thought that having herbs on the side of the house would be lovely and not a headache that would keep me up at night. The livestream camera stopped working at church, and I couldn’t fix it. For a few hours, the post calvin had headers that were so big that two letters filled the entire page.
When things settled and I had a moment to breathe, I raised my hand to share at the story time during church on a Sunday, and what came out was, “God’s been teaching me a lot about my shortcomings this year.” Which wasn’t what I prepared to say but was indeed the truth.
Call it shedding my “a pleasure to have in class” skin, call it growing out of teenage delusions of grandeur, call it submitting to the grating routine of day-to-day life without a graduation date to look towards—I am seeing the ways I don’t measure up. I’m not a handywoman. I avoid and put off tasks, even at the detriment to myself and others. I don’t make space to invite people into, choosing instead to spend the night in, to watch YouTube over dinner, to let the “we should get coffee!” conversations slip further. I find myself unmotivated to go the extra mile at work, to do the small daily maintenance of my body and my house.
And honestly folks? I’m glad. It’s comforting to see that I have flaws, and it forces me to do another thing I’m not good at: asking for help. Often in my life I have been the one that offers help, and I like doing that! I liked sitting with my friends in the hallway at 7am senior year, doing math problems together. I like logging onto Discord this days and picking apart the minutia of a game I’ve spent a lot of time learning about. But it’s not good to always be the helper. Sometimes you have to be the asker and let other people come around you and help you. Beauty of community and all that.
At the last bank I went to, that fateful scamming day, I had just withdrawn the last three thousand dollars I needed. Over the next hour, I was going to leave, listen to the guy tell me to go to this ATM and then no, a different one, finally text my family and ask, “Is this sus?” and get back, “Yes, stop right now, this is a scam, pick up the phone.” But in that moment, the teller handed over the cash and two lollipops, and she smiled at me.
Those two lollipops, and the inches-thick wad of hundred dollar bills I ended the day with, stay with me. I had done everything wrong that day—trusted the wrong people, lied to others, ignored the red flags, ditched my colleagues, got close to making the most costly mistake of my life to date—but I was still worthy of a lollipop. Two, in fact.
Alex Johnson (‘19) is a virtual computer science teacher and a proud resident of Grand Rapids. When she’s not brainstorming the newest project to inflict on her students, she’s cooking semi-vegetarian food, reading too many romance books, and playing rhythm games.
