I stole someone’s story on Medium
And I’m not even going to try and hide it.
Why?
It’s a desperate attempt to reach the 100 subscriber mark. I’ve done all the usual things — sky diving without a parachute, bungee jumping without a bungee cord, and once I’d left hospital, eaten chips without a packet.
None of this paid off — so I resorted to stealing, which if I recall, nestles nicely above self actualization in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
So what’s the story? It’s a big one. It’s that I’ve made $41 dollars with 36 followers.
It took, not courage or guts, but chutzpah. I’m not sure what that is, but I ran away from the toilet and straight to my phone.
My underpants still clean, I had to make a call.
The Spanish mafia had already asked me not to contact them, so I tried the Germans. No answer. Next, I called the Italian branch. They were out too — opera night. I tried the US branch next, and they’ve all retired.
I was ready to throw in the towel, when I decided on one final call. Except, someone beat me to it. The Portuguese mafia was on the line. They owed me one (I’d once saved their chief’s 8 page original manuscript from a fire. It’s a long story.)
The upshot is they very gladly gave me the name of Medium’s CEO. I’ll call them them Stubblestash, to preserve my plagiarism.
Fake-ipedia shows Tony Stubblestash as the CEO of the company. I wanted monetization without 100 subscribers. This guy was the man to call. Not a lower down software engineer who’d more readily take a bribe.
Below is the phone call to the CEO (it’s where I steal someone else’s ideas word for word. Don’t worry, I won’t credit them later on):
M: Me
T: Tony Stubblestash (Medium CEO)
—
M: Hello, Tony.
T: Hello. Who is this?
M: This isn’t going to work.
T: That’s very defeatist.
M: If I end the call now, you can’t reject me.
T: *hangs up*
—
That got me going. I can’t believe someone with far more wealth, much better looking, and no time to deal with idiots decided to do that. If he’d been in the same room with me to start with, I wouldn’t have even made the call.
I would have spoken to him normally.
That’s how angry I was. To have considered a pleasant conversation.
For some reason, known only to the original author of this story, Tony Stubblestash’s office is in Spain. Since I was conveniently in the country, even though I live 2,000 miles away and haven’t traveled abroad in years, I decided to visit Stubblestash.
The office is in Madrid, specifically 19 Paellas Street (this part’s my own idea). It was the height of luxury and something reminded me of John. There was an enormous poster of ex Chelsea defender John Terry stuck on a near bridge.
I knocked on the office door and shouted. It creaked open and a dark skinned man peeped out. In English, I asked for Stubblestash. In perfect English, he said, “Sorry, I don’t speak Spanish.”
With no time to reply, he closed the door and I stared downcast, downwards, down at the ground below my feet, but above the earth’s core. Then I looked up. There was a large notice in the window I hadn’t seen before.
STUBBLESTASH RETURNS IN TWO WEEKS
It was a good thing I brought my sleeping bag in my backpack, because the hotel where I was staying was just across the street. So I went back and chilled out. I visited the sites and had a great fortnight.
Then, after two weeks of hardship, I returned to Stubblestash’s office.
I was let in, we had a chat about my Medium account. He said he didn’t have the power to make any decisions for the company, and being only a lowly CEO, it made sense. I accepted his charity of $41 which he let me struggle for 5 hours to release from a broken vending machine, and headed home.
The end.
Is this Jack Thompson’s finest piece? You decide, because the ideas certainly aren’t his.
Author’s note
I hope you enjoyed this original effort. If you want to see where someone copied my idea by posting before me, check out:
