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Celebrating One Year of Revival!
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Not so Wicked anymore…
- Thread starter Mark
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I wouldn’t miss it, dude. I’m so proud of how far you’ve come from the ProBoards days, you went from a young dude trying to figure it out to an old dude trying to figure out something new.So awesome to see you here, Mark, you were such a huge part of GW, and even beyond GW for a few projects. I'm glad you jumped in for this one
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Yeah, moved a bit out of the dude range, too, lol
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Apollo was the one I went by the longest, but BritishBadAss was the terrible username I signed up under, and you likely knew me better by my deadname.Long time no see, Mark!
Crystal, what was your original name? Thank you for starting this up again!
Chris
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Everyone is dude, dude. My girlfriend is dude, my daughter is dude, my grandpa is dude.Yeah, moved a bit out of the dude range, too, lol
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Absolutely, a fair few people still call me (and everyone) dude, lol, all good
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I’m still figuring this quick reply shit out, so I missed this the first time through. Good to see a familiar name, dude. You’re definitely one I remember from my original run there.Long time no see, Mark!
Crystal, what was your original name? Thank you for starting this up again!
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Good, because I mean no disrespect. I default to “dude” these days because it’s about as PC as I’m capable of in my simple mind. You’ve always been good people in my book, and I judge people on how they treat others… not labels.Absolutely, a fair few people still call me (and everyone) dude, lol, all good
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No worries, I don't put much stock in labels, I just want to be me, lol. Dude, bro, bitch, I don't care, so long as I'm Crystal
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Yep, the good ole days
. What's scarier, the fact we all grew up from young teens together, or the fact that our original GW accounts are old enough to drink?I agree, I love seeing these names, seeing people I haven't seen in years posting on a forum again. We need more people back, definitelyI hope more people join us. GW was my favorite social media.
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Dude… there’s balding, grays, and sore joints over here. We’re like… Klowny’s age when he was new. Absolutely crazy.
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Omg that's so true!!
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Fun fact… I repossessed one of his aides vehicles…
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Oh wow…..thanks for that !
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I had to. He’s gonna live on somehow. You know he’d be talking shit about us whining about getting old.
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Guy was a legend to be fair x
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He was, and always had the best takes on stuff… even if you didn’t want to hear it. He was definitely insightful, too… shared a lot of his experience with us.
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Oh nooo, why did you need to say that?! hahaha
Damn, you're not wrong, but you should be putting a spoiler tag on that kinda stuff! 
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Always have and always will troll in plain sight.Oh nooo, why did you need to say that?! hahaha
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I guess I’ll borrow a cue from everyone else and give a proper reintroduction now…
For those of you that didn’t really know me like that, I joined the forums back on October 1st, 2001. Prior to that, I skimmed the boards for answers as a guest and visited the main site going back as far as the late 90’s. I initially joined to post a question in the FFVII forum… and promptly got hit with a warning for spamming. I didn’t even know what the fuck that even meant at that point.
At that particular time, I started becoming interested in computers as a teenager. That’s not really where my story begins, though. But… I promise it won’t be as gut-wrenching as some of the others we’ve read.
I was always a loner growing up. Introverted. Quiet. Analytical. I didn’t have many friends as a kid, quite honestly… because I wasn’t allowed. I went to school. Hung out on my block with the few I had. Went to bed. Repeat. I grew up in a small neighborhood in Baltimore city, where we had our own little elementary and middle school combined. Despite living in a “big” city, everyone grew up with their parent’s friend’s kids and so on and so on. Everyone knew everybody. My escape into the internet and communities started around 13, right before I went to high school. I made some friends contributing to a weekly heavy metal newsletter, it was a small thing… just a way to share music with other local kids. That kinda faded out after a while… we really didn’t know what we were doing, and we were all minors… so it wasn’t like we were catching any live shows to discover anything.
To condense this inevitably long story, my parents are a trip. I love them both dearly, but… fuck… they’re wild. They were incompatible, period. My childhood is littered with memories of my controlling Catholic school mother trying to restrict my wild child father. Their fighting and bickering led me to a life of chilling in my room playing games by myself, until my little brother was born. I shared my interest in gaming with him early, and we bonded over games and staying out of our parents way growing up. He’s 7 years younger than me. Then, came my sister… 12 years younger, and a toddler by the time I registered at GW… when I myself was only 15. Our parents separated shortly after my birthday that year… the same year I dropped out of high-school. I was bussed from SW Baltimore to NE Baltimore to attend high school when Columbine was still all over the news… and for a white kid that likes heavy metal… I was a target. A handful of us white kids went to that school from the same elementary/middle school. We got the shit kicked out of us, some hospitalized and permanently damaged from those encounters. Myself included, I was stabbed in my leg at 14. Luckily, he missed what he was aiming for because I caught him mid-lunge towards my neck/chest. That incident changed me… from being the kid that was picked on for liking heavy metal and having long hair, to being that kid that fought for his life. I went through the rest of that school year cutting class and getting stoned with my friends while fighting our way through chaos everyday in the halls. I wasn’t a violent person up until that point, only defending myself when necessary. After that… I had an “I’m gonna get you before you get me” attitude.
Fast-forward a year and my parents divorced, I resented my father because I was made to. I was manipulated into believing he was the sole fault for everything that went wrong in my life at that point. I took the opportunity to avoid getting into fights all the time to drop out and start working to support my mother and siblings. It was part necessity, part “I’m not gonna live very long if I keep going to this school” and there were NO options for transfers that would have been better than where I landed… a vo-tech school. It was simple math… my mom needed help… my family needed help… I was strong and capable of working, so I got in the family business. With my father. Who I barely had a relationship with.
In the midst of that… I was watching my siblings after work so my mother could go out tanning or to bars or wherever with her girlfriends so she could live out the young years she lost getting married at 18 and having me by 21. So… what do I do with myself? I can’t get stoned, gotta watch the kids. I can’t go out, gotta watch the kids. By the end of the day… I had a few hours a night when it was just me, and that’s when mdx381 was created. My first name. My last name. An X to put in between the last 3 digits of my student ID at HS. I spent a few months only posting in the FFVII forum as well as some other game-specific forums. As I got more and more involved, I started participating with various FOG forums… GWC, GWW, C&C/C&CW, and maybe some others. That’s when the gears started turning… I wanted to create a game myself. I had a nightly ritual of going outside… smoking a bowl… and then coming back inside and getting started on the forums. I started brainstorming what would eventually become GWVRPG, which was a STUPID title… but what do you expect from a teenage pothead? The concept was cool enough to get a nod from @Bandicoot though… which resulted in me joining the mod team instantly, without a vote, beginning a string of controversy with me and some others. I get it… new guy comes in and a few months later he’s a mod of a forum that he brainstormed… convenient. The concept was DEEP, though. I had all kinds of text files… it was practically a “choose your own adventure” thing with stats that stacked like an RPG. In my defense… had I not been made a mod, I would have made someone’s life a living hell merging, splitting, and sticking threads. 90% of becoming a mod was likely “let’s just let him handle this so he leaves us alone”, and I’m cool with that.
It didn’t take long to get overwhelmed with the first iteration of the game, so I basically took it down and had it rebranded into a new name so I could scale it better… it had gotten too active for me to maintain it in the original state. After a while, there were just too many limitations and too much to keep up with by myself on that, so it kinda fizzled out and I moved on. At that time, I was moderating other forums and had plenty going on in my personal life… so I didn’t mind it’s absence, despite the concept part providing me something to keep the gears turning.
Eventually, I was promoted to the VMG. Around then is when I was known as Heretic… changing my name to Wicked as I shifted over to smod. That’s pretty much when what most of y’all know of me began… because that’s when I began to take on more of a public role.
Which is when this all began. I wanted a way to be able to see my posts in the middle of rapidly scrolling so I knew where I left off. It quickly became how people spotted my posts in the crowd, and became part of my online signature. It translated over to AIM and all the other messengers, and that itself gave me the idea… how far could I run with this? It was around that time that Insomniac’s Magic 8-Ball was created… which eventually rebranded as “Ask Wicked” when I got into cult stage, which… yes… I regret to inform you was all satire. It was my way of poking fun at the various fan clubs that were also far from serious (looking at you @The Eye in the Sky!) but with a bizarre twist where I acted as if I were some kind of all-knowing idiot that stayed up real late answering absurd questions in this typical long-form nature y’all are accustomed to… or alternatively… really short and dismissive responses if you weren’t one of the “chosen ones” in my “clique”. It was absolutely juvenile, but played so hard against what I really am… just a quiet dude that minds his own business. I loved it. I mentioned in another post the photos of members holding up printed signs and having custom titles marked with my signature font and color… the whole thing was just so ridiculous, and the fact that people actually thought it was serious made the people involved and myself just milk it that much more. Before you know it… I had a cult-like following of people being just as goofy as I was for no reason other than the fact that we thought it was funny to act like I’m all high and mighty when the truth was, I was just as stupid as I pretended to be important. Ultimately, I also think it was a way for me to still get away with goofing off while being a member of the administration. Admin “life” was going good, the forums were becoming more functional, the server messages were down, we were proactively purging old posts, I had finally rewritten MA’s mod handbook to be something more practical, things were going smoothly. The personality that came through on the 8-Ball/Ask Wicked/PIMI forums were my outlet for my outlet at GW. It seems silly to say, but that ability to separate “work” me from “regular” me has carried on through to the present day, and it all started there, and played a major role in my survival in later years. More on that later.
I met the mother of my daughter back in 04, right after I turned 18. That was pretty much when I was too cool for y’all… prior to her, my other girlfriends were just flings. She was my first real serious relationship. My activity tapered off to nothing, I got demoted somewhere along the line, and who knows what happened after that. Anyways… we’re back to regular text. This is serious time. Looking back, I could provide y’all tons of reasons why I was dumb for being with her… that’s a whole different story. We’ll just keep this one as short as possible. She liked attention more than love. She cheated with coworkers. I left her, kicked her out of my place, she came back and tried winning me back… ultimately getting pregnant. Yup, trapped me. She behaved until our daughter was about 2, then started her antics up again… which led to a deep depression. I knew I was played. I KNEW it. She got me before, and got me again… but this time she was going to do to our child what we promised we wouldn’t do because we were raised that way…bring her up in a broken home. This was around when RS started up with @Cole, and at the time I was spending a lot of my free time focusing on that desperately trying to keep myself occupied. I reverted… I went for something I knew helped me through bad times before. After a while, what I was going through wasn’t being numbed by any distraction… I started with drinking again, fell hard into that well. I got involved with popping OxyContin, Xanax, Percocet, MDMA, or anything else that could change my mood. I overdosed one night and was left to just deal with it… the woman that broke me bailed on me, the one I helped rebuild knocked me down. When I regained consciousness, it hit me… and I was angry. Her and I argued days later, I sat outside by myself drinking while she cried and my kid slept… because I REFUSED to be that drunk asshole in front of my child. I packed a bookbag up with some clothes, grabbed my half gallon of tequila, and buckled it in the front seat since I lost the cap. I drove 20 miles while continuously drinking, and ended up on my dad’s front porch with no recollection of how I got there. I slept off my hangover… detoxed from the opiates… and spent MONTHS spending my free time with my brother playing games, bringing that back into my life. By this point, I had already lived on my own… so being at my dad’s house… with his wife… and my brother… it was different. I had already tasted adult life, and knew I had to get out… but the recession was in full force, so I wasn’t making much money at all doing upholstery at the family business. We cut hours. Laid people off. Everything. It was bad, and my first experience in management… using communication skills first learned at GW.
Then, one day I get hit with “The company is closing and I’m moving in with your grandfather, you’re gonna have to work things out for yourself… your mom has your old room available, but you’re gonna have to rehab it first.” So, I had a short period of time to get another job AND make the money to rehab a ROOM to live in at a house that was neglected by my mother… who at this point became a hoarder. This is when I became a repo man… a career change I never expected, but more on that later. To shorten another long story… I ended up dating a girl around that time that I was friends with after my ex and I split. I knew her for a few years in between then and this point in the story. Her and I had similar histories with rocky relationships… she had miscarried in hers and was physically abused, I was what she told me was “emotionally abused”… a phrase I never knew before then, and one repeated more and more as time went on and she learned about my life growing up. I’m not a victim, though… I make that very clear. There’s a big distinction between what I experienced and other forms of abuse. I made BAD decisions that resulted in being treated poorly by others and myself… I wasn’t beaten because my ex came home drunk, but… as I would learn… that emotional stuff takes a toll, too. But… I knew nothing about that. I’m a MAN. Right? Yeah… exactly. Anyway… that ex ended up taking everything she learned about me and used it to manipulate me and work me over pretty bad… but that’s coming up.
When I started doing repo, it woke me up. It gave me a sense of purpose I had only felt a handful of times in my life. I went from being the new guy to training people in six months and then rewriting the ENTIRE process for the company I worked for. They treated me like shit, paid me like shit, and let all kinds of bad shit happen on their watch. I eventually packed up my gear and took a higher paying job at another company, where I was given my own location to run and agents working under me. I steadily climbed the ranks between both the first company and second, developing a reputation as one of the best in the state. I was highly sought after, turning down nearly 6 figure jobs in my early 30’s without even a high school diploma. I FINALLY turned the corner and things were looking up for me I had cars, a house, a girlfriend… and then an incident happened at work where I was nearly killed on a repo… and then another… and another. I got tired of the reckless nature of management above me and the piss poor maintenance of equipment… I had a fucking wheel fly off on the interstate. They cut every corner possible. Eventually, I got offered a job where I would be in a brand new vehicle with ballistic panels and bulletproof glass, all top of the line equipment. This company literally spent more than what I made in a year just to get me on board… how could I say no? So, I went there, with more experience than even the owners… took my signing bonus, signed on the dotted line, and the next thing you know… micromanagement reared it’s head again. I had a guy with ZERO field experience telling me to go into a neighborhood at 8:30pm less than a year after I had BARELY escaped that same neighborhood with my life to repossess a convicted violent felon’s vehicle. The COUSIN of the guy and his friends who shot my car up at the previous company. Needless to say, I refused, offered to recover 3 other vehicles less than 10 minutes away and return to that hot location later in the night to secure the bank-requested vehicle. The owner started getting rude, which led to me saying “sure, I’ll go get it at 8:30… but you better be ready by 8, because I’m coming to pick your ass up first so you can see EXACTLY why I’m saying this is a bad idea since you know so much better than me”. Now… I dunno how many of y’all have management experience, but when you’re upper management… you don’t go to the owner of the company and call him out like that and expect to keep your job. I got hit with insubordination and suspended. While I was on my “vacation”… the ex, the same one I was referring to in the same timeline as starting repo, got busted. I was home during the day, and home with her at night… so I was able to see just how “not right” everything was for the first time in years. On the surface, we were busy working different schedules and only seeing each other on weekends… like so many other couples our age. It seemed normal. Being home definitely opened my eyes, though… because prior I had been working 50, 60, sometimes 70 hours a week on the road. She was there waiting when I’d get back from NY or wherever. Always. BUT. She was running around with her coworker and a friend from high school behind my back. One of the things about my job is the training I received, both formal and informal in real-world experience. I know a bullshitter when I see one. My situational awareness is compared to former military and police by friends that know me and have backgrounds in both. You CAN cheat on anyone, but you CANNOT get away with it with someone like me. I caught her, collected enough evidence to prevent her from lying her way out of it, and hit her with a bomb.
We broke up, and I got fired in the same week. My savings were drained, because she had a drug problem and helped herself to my accounts knowing full well my own history with substance abuse. Another thing I didn’t learn until my time spent at home. My truck had broken down and needed several grand to become operable again. I had NOTHING left again, but the guitar, my clothes, and the jar of weed that helped me fall asleep from my recently discovered PTSD. Apparently you can’t go through all of the bad shit I went through without being a little messed up in the head, and apparently if you don’t sleep well you could crash. I didn’t want drugs again. At all. I decided instead of the medications I was recommended, that I’d self-medicate with cannabis as I always had in the past… at least I knew that would help substantially with none of the side-effects.
So… alone and with nowhere to go, I called my dad. He let me crash in his warehouse for almost two years. That’s where I rebuilt myself for hopefully this last time, and when I’ve became who you’re reading this message from today. At nearly the second year mark, I reconnected with my girlfriend. I grew up with her. We knew each other as kids… before life fucked us up. We got caught up and shared all of our stories, not unlike what we’ve all been doing here lately… and we decided to hang out at her place, she was living with a roommate at the time in a townhouse. Her and I have been inseparable since… 3 years as of the end of July. For the first time, I know what it’s like to have someone that gives a shit if I make it through the door in the morning… to matter to someone… because everyone else always sought me out to fulfill their needs, this is the first time in my life I’ve ever been asked “Mark, are you happy?”
Yeah, I am. Finally.
My life isn’t nearly as filled with material things as it used to be… I have an uphill battle ahead of me to have all of those things again, but… I will. I couldn’t tell you the last time I’ve had the extra cash to buy a game, but I got friends that let me use their PSN accounts to download them on my system so I get to play newish stuff on my used PS4 and my 13 year old tv, but… that doesn’t matter to me. The pandemic killed repo for me, so I act as a consultant for fees when I can for now. It gave me the time to reflect to realize I’m lucky that I’m alive. Between all the shit I did to myself, and all the shit that happened to me on the job… I shouldn’t be here. There’s no two ways about it, and I wish I was sensationalizing it for clout, but it’s the cold hard truth.
Thanks for reading this, and thanks for being a part of this one little shiny part of my past that I still have. In all seriousness, the timing of this couldn’t be any better. I’m finally at a point in my life where I can appreciate how important the forums and people in it were to help me through formative years, and if anything I ever did was able to help you do the same, I appreciate that as well… because that’s all I ever really wanted, just to be a positive part of something that was so positive for me.
Reading all these stories makes me realize how similar we all were despite how different we were and still are.
Thank you all for sharing your stories, and thanks for taking the time to read mine.
For those of you that didn’t really know me like that, I joined the forums back on October 1st, 2001. Prior to that, I skimmed the boards for answers as a guest and visited the main site going back as far as the late 90’s. I initially joined to post a question in the FFVII forum… and promptly got hit with a warning for spamming. I didn’t even know what the fuck that even meant at that point.
At that particular time, I started becoming interested in computers as a teenager. That’s not really where my story begins, though. But… I promise it won’t be as gut-wrenching as some of the others we’ve read.
I was always a loner growing up. Introverted. Quiet. Analytical. I didn’t have many friends as a kid, quite honestly… because I wasn’t allowed. I went to school. Hung out on my block with the few I had. Went to bed. Repeat. I grew up in a small neighborhood in Baltimore city, where we had our own little elementary and middle school combined. Despite living in a “big” city, everyone grew up with their parent’s friend’s kids and so on and so on. Everyone knew everybody. My escape into the internet and communities started around 13, right before I went to high school. I made some friends contributing to a weekly heavy metal newsletter, it was a small thing… just a way to share music with other local kids. That kinda faded out after a while… we really didn’t know what we were doing, and we were all minors… so it wasn’t like we were catching any live shows to discover anything.
To condense this inevitably long story, my parents are a trip. I love them both dearly, but… fuck… they’re wild. They were incompatible, period. My childhood is littered with memories of my controlling Catholic school mother trying to restrict my wild child father. Their fighting and bickering led me to a life of chilling in my room playing games by myself, until my little brother was born. I shared my interest in gaming with him early, and we bonded over games and staying out of our parents way growing up. He’s 7 years younger than me. Then, came my sister… 12 years younger, and a toddler by the time I registered at GW… when I myself was only 15. Our parents separated shortly after my birthday that year… the same year I dropped out of high-school. I was bussed from SW Baltimore to NE Baltimore to attend high school when Columbine was still all over the news… and for a white kid that likes heavy metal… I was a target. A handful of us white kids went to that school from the same elementary/middle school. We got the shit kicked out of us, some hospitalized and permanently damaged from those encounters. Myself included, I was stabbed in my leg at 14. Luckily, he missed what he was aiming for because I caught him mid-lunge towards my neck/chest. That incident changed me… from being the kid that was picked on for liking heavy metal and having long hair, to being that kid that fought for his life. I went through the rest of that school year cutting class and getting stoned with my friends while fighting our way through chaos everyday in the halls. I wasn’t a violent person up until that point, only defending myself when necessary. After that… I had an “I’m gonna get you before you get me” attitude.
Fast-forward a year and my parents divorced, I resented my father because I was made to. I was manipulated into believing he was the sole fault for everything that went wrong in my life at that point. I took the opportunity to avoid getting into fights all the time to drop out and start working to support my mother and siblings. It was part necessity, part “I’m not gonna live very long if I keep going to this school” and there were NO options for transfers that would have been better than where I landed… a vo-tech school. It was simple math… my mom needed help… my family needed help… I was strong and capable of working, so I got in the family business. With my father. Who I barely had a relationship with.
In the midst of that… I was watching my siblings after work so my mother could go out tanning or to bars or wherever with her girlfriends so she could live out the young years she lost getting married at 18 and having me by 21. So… what do I do with myself? I can’t get stoned, gotta watch the kids. I can’t go out, gotta watch the kids. By the end of the day… I had a few hours a night when it was just me, and that’s when mdx381 was created. My first name. My last name. An X to put in between the last 3 digits of my student ID at HS. I spent a few months only posting in the FFVII forum as well as some other game-specific forums. As I got more and more involved, I started participating with various FOG forums… GWC, GWW, C&C/C&CW, and maybe some others. That’s when the gears started turning… I wanted to create a game myself. I had a nightly ritual of going outside… smoking a bowl… and then coming back inside and getting started on the forums. I started brainstorming what would eventually become GWVRPG, which was a STUPID title… but what do you expect from a teenage pothead? The concept was cool enough to get a nod from @Bandicoot though… which resulted in me joining the mod team instantly, without a vote, beginning a string of controversy with me and some others. I get it… new guy comes in and a few months later he’s a mod of a forum that he brainstormed… convenient. The concept was DEEP, though. I had all kinds of text files… it was practically a “choose your own adventure” thing with stats that stacked like an RPG. In my defense… had I not been made a mod, I would have made someone’s life a living hell merging, splitting, and sticking threads. 90% of becoming a mod was likely “let’s just let him handle this so he leaves us alone”, and I’m cool with that.
It didn’t take long to get overwhelmed with the first iteration of the game, so I basically took it down and had it rebranded into a new name so I could scale it better… it had gotten too active for me to maintain it in the original state. After a while, there were just too many limitations and too much to keep up with by myself on that, so it kinda fizzled out and I moved on. At that time, I was moderating other forums and had plenty going on in my personal life… so I didn’t mind it’s absence, despite the concept part providing me something to keep the gears turning.
Eventually, I was promoted to the VMG. Around then is when I was known as Heretic… changing my name to Wicked as I shifted over to smod. That’s pretty much when what most of y’all know of me began… because that’s when I began to take on more of a public role.
Which is when this all began. I wanted a way to be able to see my posts in the middle of rapidly scrolling so I knew where I left off. It quickly became how people spotted my posts in the crowd, and became part of my online signature. It translated over to AIM and all the other messengers, and that itself gave me the idea… how far could I run with this? It was around that time that Insomniac’s Magic 8-Ball was created… which eventually rebranded as “Ask Wicked” when I got into cult stage, which… yes… I regret to inform you was all satire. It was my way of poking fun at the various fan clubs that were also far from serious (looking at you @The Eye in the Sky!) but with a bizarre twist where I acted as if I were some kind of all-knowing idiot that stayed up real late answering absurd questions in this typical long-form nature y’all are accustomed to… or alternatively… really short and dismissive responses if you weren’t one of the “chosen ones” in my “clique”. It was absolutely juvenile, but played so hard against what I really am… just a quiet dude that minds his own business. I loved it. I mentioned in another post the photos of members holding up printed signs and having custom titles marked with my signature font and color… the whole thing was just so ridiculous, and the fact that people actually thought it was serious made the people involved and myself just milk it that much more. Before you know it… I had a cult-like following of people being just as goofy as I was for no reason other than the fact that we thought it was funny to act like I’m all high and mighty when the truth was, I was just as stupid as I pretended to be important. Ultimately, I also think it was a way for me to still get away with goofing off while being a member of the administration. Admin “life” was going good, the forums were becoming more functional, the server messages were down, we were proactively purging old posts, I had finally rewritten MA’s mod handbook to be something more practical, things were going smoothly. The personality that came through on the 8-Ball/Ask Wicked/PIMI forums were my outlet for my outlet at GW. It seems silly to say, but that ability to separate “work” me from “regular” me has carried on through to the present day, and it all started there, and played a major role in my survival in later years. More on that later.
I met the mother of my daughter back in 04, right after I turned 18. That was pretty much when I was too cool for y’all… prior to her, my other girlfriends were just flings. She was my first real serious relationship. My activity tapered off to nothing, I got demoted somewhere along the line, and who knows what happened after that. Anyways… we’re back to regular text. This is serious time. Looking back, I could provide y’all tons of reasons why I was dumb for being with her… that’s a whole different story. We’ll just keep this one as short as possible. She liked attention more than love. She cheated with coworkers. I left her, kicked her out of my place, she came back and tried winning me back… ultimately getting pregnant. Yup, trapped me. She behaved until our daughter was about 2, then started her antics up again… which led to a deep depression. I knew I was played. I KNEW it. She got me before, and got me again… but this time she was going to do to our child what we promised we wouldn’t do because we were raised that way…bring her up in a broken home. This was around when RS started up with @Cole, and at the time I was spending a lot of my free time focusing on that desperately trying to keep myself occupied. I reverted… I went for something I knew helped me through bad times before. After a while, what I was going through wasn’t being numbed by any distraction… I started with drinking again, fell hard into that well. I got involved with popping OxyContin, Xanax, Percocet, MDMA, or anything else that could change my mood. I overdosed one night and was left to just deal with it… the woman that broke me bailed on me, the one I helped rebuild knocked me down. When I regained consciousness, it hit me… and I was angry. Her and I argued days later, I sat outside by myself drinking while she cried and my kid slept… because I REFUSED to be that drunk asshole in front of my child. I packed a bookbag up with some clothes, grabbed my half gallon of tequila, and buckled it in the front seat since I lost the cap. I drove 20 miles while continuously drinking, and ended up on my dad’s front porch with no recollection of how I got there. I slept off my hangover… detoxed from the opiates… and spent MONTHS spending my free time with my brother playing games, bringing that back into my life. By this point, I had already lived on my own… so being at my dad’s house… with his wife… and my brother… it was different. I had already tasted adult life, and knew I had to get out… but the recession was in full force, so I wasn’t making much money at all doing upholstery at the family business. We cut hours. Laid people off. Everything. It was bad, and my first experience in management… using communication skills first learned at GW.
Then, one day I get hit with “The company is closing and I’m moving in with your grandfather, you’re gonna have to work things out for yourself… your mom has your old room available, but you’re gonna have to rehab it first.” So, I had a short period of time to get another job AND make the money to rehab a ROOM to live in at a house that was neglected by my mother… who at this point became a hoarder. This is when I became a repo man… a career change I never expected, but more on that later. To shorten another long story… I ended up dating a girl around that time that I was friends with after my ex and I split. I knew her for a few years in between then and this point in the story. Her and I had similar histories with rocky relationships… she had miscarried in hers and was physically abused, I was what she told me was “emotionally abused”… a phrase I never knew before then, and one repeated more and more as time went on and she learned about my life growing up. I’m not a victim, though… I make that very clear. There’s a big distinction between what I experienced and other forms of abuse. I made BAD decisions that resulted in being treated poorly by others and myself… I wasn’t beaten because my ex came home drunk, but… as I would learn… that emotional stuff takes a toll, too. But… I knew nothing about that. I’m a MAN. Right? Yeah… exactly. Anyway… that ex ended up taking everything she learned about me and used it to manipulate me and work me over pretty bad… but that’s coming up.
When I started doing repo, it woke me up. It gave me a sense of purpose I had only felt a handful of times in my life. I went from being the new guy to training people in six months and then rewriting the ENTIRE process for the company I worked for. They treated me like shit, paid me like shit, and let all kinds of bad shit happen on their watch. I eventually packed up my gear and took a higher paying job at another company, where I was given my own location to run and agents working under me. I steadily climbed the ranks between both the first company and second, developing a reputation as one of the best in the state. I was highly sought after, turning down nearly 6 figure jobs in my early 30’s without even a high school diploma. I FINALLY turned the corner and things were looking up for me I had cars, a house, a girlfriend… and then an incident happened at work where I was nearly killed on a repo… and then another… and another. I got tired of the reckless nature of management above me and the piss poor maintenance of equipment… I had a fucking wheel fly off on the interstate. They cut every corner possible. Eventually, I got offered a job where I would be in a brand new vehicle with ballistic panels and bulletproof glass, all top of the line equipment. This company literally spent more than what I made in a year just to get me on board… how could I say no? So, I went there, with more experience than even the owners… took my signing bonus, signed on the dotted line, and the next thing you know… micromanagement reared it’s head again. I had a guy with ZERO field experience telling me to go into a neighborhood at 8:30pm less than a year after I had BARELY escaped that same neighborhood with my life to repossess a convicted violent felon’s vehicle. The COUSIN of the guy and his friends who shot my car up at the previous company. Needless to say, I refused, offered to recover 3 other vehicles less than 10 minutes away and return to that hot location later in the night to secure the bank-requested vehicle. The owner started getting rude, which led to me saying “sure, I’ll go get it at 8:30… but you better be ready by 8, because I’m coming to pick your ass up first so you can see EXACTLY why I’m saying this is a bad idea since you know so much better than me”. Now… I dunno how many of y’all have management experience, but when you’re upper management… you don’t go to the owner of the company and call him out like that and expect to keep your job. I got hit with insubordination and suspended. While I was on my “vacation”… the ex, the same one I was referring to in the same timeline as starting repo, got busted. I was home during the day, and home with her at night… so I was able to see just how “not right” everything was for the first time in years. On the surface, we were busy working different schedules and only seeing each other on weekends… like so many other couples our age. It seemed normal. Being home definitely opened my eyes, though… because prior I had been working 50, 60, sometimes 70 hours a week on the road. She was there waiting when I’d get back from NY or wherever. Always. BUT. She was running around with her coworker and a friend from high school behind my back. One of the things about my job is the training I received, both formal and informal in real-world experience. I know a bullshitter when I see one. My situational awareness is compared to former military and police by friends that know me and have backgrounds in both. You CAN cheat on anyone, but you CANNOT get away with it with someone like me. I caught her, collected enough evidence to prevent her from lying her way out of it, and hit her with a bomb.
We broke up, and I got fired in the same week. My savings were drained, because she had a drug problem and helped herself to my accounts knowing full well my own history with substance abuse. Another thing I didn’t learn until my time spent at home. My truck had broken down and needed several grand to become operable again. I had NOTHING left again, but the guitar, my clothes, and the jar of weed that helped me fall asleep from my recently discovered PTSD. Apparently you can’t go through all of the bad shit I went through without being a little messed up in the head, and apparently if you don’t sleep well you could crash. I didn’t want drugs again. At all. I decided instead of the medications I was recommended, that I’d self-medicate with cannabis as I always had in the past… at least I knew that would help substantially with none of the side-effects.
So… alone and with nowhere to go, I called my dad. He let me crash in his warehouse for almost two years. That’s where I rebuilt myself for hopefully this last time, and when I’ve became who you’re reading this message from today. At nearly the second year mark, I reconnected with my girlfriend. I grew up with her. We knew each other as kids… before life fucked us up. We got caught up and shared all of our stories, not unlike what we’ve all been doing here lately… and we decided to hang out at her place, she was living with a roommate at the time in a townhouse. Her and I have been inseparable since… 3 years as of the end of July. For the first time, I know what it’s like to have someone that gives a shit if I make it through the door in the morning… to matter to someone… because everyone else always sought me out to fulfill their needs, this is the first time in my life I’ve ever been asked “Mark, are you happy?”
Yeah, I am. Finally.
My life isn’t nearly as filled with material things as it used to be… I have an uphill battle ahead of me to have all of those things again, but… I will. I couldn’t tell you the last time I’ve had the extra cash to buy a game, but I got friends that let me use their PSN accounts to download them on my system so I get to play newish stuff on my used PS4 and my 13 year old tv, but… that doesn’t matter to me. The pandemic killed repo for me, so I act as a consultant for fees when I can for now. It gave me the time to reflect to realize I’m lucky that I’m alive. Between all the shit I did to myself, and all the shit that happened to me on the job… I shouldn’t be here. There’s no two ways about it, and I wish I was sensationalizing it for clout, but it’s the cold hard truth.
Thanks for reading this, and thanks for being a part of this one little shiny part of my past that I still have. In all seriousness, the timing of this couldn’t be any better. I’m finally at a point in my life where I can appreciate how important the forums and people in it were to help me through formative years, and if anything I ever did was able to help you do the same, I appreciate that as well… because that’s all I ever really wanted, just to be a positive part of something that was so positive for me.
Reading all these stories makes me realize how similar we all were despite how different we were and still are.
Thank you all for sharing your stories, and thanks for taking the time to read mine.
there is a simple truth that I think we sometimes forget, or don't want to admit. before the internet became a real part of our world, during the burgeoning days that we all became internet junkies
every single one of us, every one that spent a lot of time on the internet back then, became staff on a stupid forum, or anything else people scoffed at.
there was something "wrong" with all of us.
some were heavily depressed and escaped on the internet.
some considered themselves too "ugly" or "fat" that they felt like the only way to be accepted was if no one could see them.
some were trans and weren't ready to admit it, it was safer for them to be online where no one would know what you were biologically born as unless you told them.
some were just incredibly socially anxious and found friendship and social lives in the comfort of their homes
EVERYONE that spent a lot of time on the internet before it became what we know of the internet wrong was "one of the broken ones".
all the stupid fights, the feuds, the trolling, the hatred, the drama. it's all fucking stupid. we were all looking for a place to belong because we felt ousted from the real world.
we were all stupid kids on an internet we didn't realize the power of.
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I couldn’t have said it better, and I’m thankful for all you broken fuckers.
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