When I was in 7th grade I was given the honor of “paper duty”. The fuck is that you ask? Well, our school was giving out free paper-anything (think notebooks, folders, anything a kid could need to write stuff for school) to every student because no student should suffer from his poor family background and a lack of writing utensils. Fantastic concept if you ask me but it had an issue back then. The unlimited power of the paper kid. As such your job would be to hand out paperproducts to those who needed them for the entire school year. How this hasn’t been abused until shithead teenage me came along is a mystery to me. I took a lot and I handed it out to friends, filled up a closet at home and would slip notebooks to kids for personal favors. The corruption was absolute. If I liked you a simple nod would be enough to get some juicy paper ware. If I didn’t care about you, you’d have to show me your full old notebook to get a new one as was protocol. If I didn’t like you I’d give you some anyway but not before breaking your balls for a bit. I was drunk on paper power and loving every second of it.
In hindsight I feel very bad about abusing a social system intended to help kids like myself who didn’t have wealthy parents but with 13, growing up poor as fuck I’d take everything I could get.
Anyway, at the end of the school year they noticed how many supplies had vanished despite no increase in students but they couldn’t tell who had taken more because guess who had the responsibility to fill up the paper closet with new paper from the unsupervised storage room? They just handed us all the keys and let us do our thing. My thing happened to be paper embezzlement.
End of the story was an overhaul of the paper duty concept. From that year onwards it was done in teams of 2 who had to promise not to take anything and keep a detailed inventory spreadsheet that was checked once a month. Additionally only the teacher had the key to the storage room.
The moral of the story is that no 13 year old should wield that much raw power.
When I was in 7th grade I was given the honor of “paper duty”. The fuck is that you ask? Well, our school was giving out free paper-anything (think notebooks, folders, anything a kid could need to write stuff for school) to every student because no student should suffer from his poor family background and a lack of writing utensils. Fantastic concept if you ask me but it had an issue back then. The unlimited power of the paper kid. As such your job would be to hand out paperproducts to those who needed them for the entire school year. How this hasn’t been abused until shithead teenage me came along is a mystery to me. I took a lot and I handed it out to friends, filled up a closet at home and would slip notebooks to kids for personal favors. The corruption was absolute. If I liked you a simple nod would be enough to get some juicy paper ware. If I didn’t care about you, you’d have to show me your full old notebook to get a new one as was protocol. If I didn’t like you I’d give you some anyway but not before breaking your balls for a bit. I was drunk on paper power and loving every second of it. In hindsight I feel very bad about abusing a social system intended to help kids like myself who didn’t have wealthy parents but with 13, growing up poor as fuck I’d take everything I could get. Anyway, at the end of the school year they noticed how many supplies had vanished despite no increase in students but they couldn’t tell who had taken more because guess who had the responsibility to fill up the paper closet with new paper from the unsupervised storage room? They just handed us all the keys and let us do our thing. My thing happened to be paper embezzlement. End of the story was an overhaul of the paper duty concept. From that year onwards it was done in teams of 2 who had to promise not to take anything and keep a detailed inventory spreadsheet that was checked once a month. Additionally only the teacher had the key to the storage room. The moral of the story is that no 13 year old should wield that much raw power.