Have you ever scrolled through a tattoo artist's Instagram page and not seen the thing you were looking for?
I have.
I've seen it before. It was a tattoo artist who everyone swore did great work. I looked at all of his work up and down.
Clearly, he did great work. Or at least he tried.
His social media feed showed a lot of good, colorful tattoos all on white skin. That wasn't good enough for me. So, I went in and I talked to him. He said he didn't really want to work on black skin.
I asked him why.
He said it didn't pop the right way, but he referred me to one of his friends who did the kind of tattoos that I wanted. And when it went to him, he said that he would do it but he prefers a monochrome or like a black and white type thing. I was asking for some color. I always love a little bit of color. But this guy, he wanted to do some Line work.
That wasn't what I was looking for, exactly.
I told him I was there for a pop of color. I want to get the Trinidadian flag. I want to get that red. I want to get that stripe of black and white. I don't want an American flag.
They all know I'm an American whenever I open my mouth. I want to differentiate myself.
It was the same thing when I tried to go to this black owned business down the street.
They were advertising how they had their dresses in XL and double XL and for curvy women. But I didn't see any pictures of curvy women in their dresses online. I checked all the social media that they made all the pictures, and it was all lies. I just wanted to see one woman my size wearing that stuff.
It got to the point where I just wasn't seeing what I wanted. That's why I made it a point to look before I jumped.
I just wanted to have patience for these small creators that although I want to support them, they just don't make the thing that I'm looking for. And that is what you're trying to solve in business. You're trying to solve the problem of someone wanting a thing. It's a pain point. If you can solve someone's pain point then you can solve anything.
It was that kind of rant that got me my job as a business professor. Also, my three degrees, but that's another story.
To be fair, it wasn't difficult. They're always looking for people and I just had the qualifications they wanted.
There I was, giving her the speech about the difference between lean six sigma and the other types of business operations and preparing for the deluge of questions from kids that thought that business would be easy.
Let me just tell you this, right now. Business is not easy. Business is never easy, especially if you're in it for yourself.
Because if you're in it for yourself, you must make the product. You must take care of the taxes and all the back end and all the front end and it's just a lot. That's why the kind of person that can do the thing and market the thing is so rare and hard to find. It's also why most businesses fail.
That is why I began playing a lot of MOBA games before I landed on my favorite one. If you've never played a MOBA game, picture a bunch of lanes, usually three where a bunch of Heroes will go out and go down the lanes and fight each other.
The lanes will send minions down to defeat towers that you make or traps that you set. And each team has their own base that spawns their minions and you’ve got to keep your face safe and yada yada yada. There's a bunch of games that are like this that I like all of them and that's kind of a problem.
Being a business professor means that you must teach undergraduates about a subject that they expect to be easy or simple. When the dean offered me to take over our certificate program for esports management, I wasn't surprised.
Well, I was surprised. It's not every day that the dean comes up to you and asks you about this kind of thing. Knowing next to nothing about it, I was particularly interested because I was a gamer.
Over the summer, I made a curriculum and played the shit out of the hot game at the time.
I would have played the shit out of it anyway. But I got that extra kick because I wanted to do it.
But anyway, that was the day that I got to announce the extracurricular program and how they just had to take three of my courses to get the certificate in esports management.
Several of the heads in my business 101 lecture nodded at that. Some were more interested. Some were less.
I went over the program briefly before the end of the class and when the time was up, there were a few people that stuck around. They were brown nosing, trying to figure out a way to get more points. Who needs extra credit on a business one-on-one course? Not everybody there was going to be taking business as their major. For most of them, they were looking at taking this as an elective, and sitting if they could get an easy A.
I might be an easy A but not in this class.
I'm not going to go into my romantic life right now but suffice to say I'm good for the time being. I don't need anything long term. I'm in my Kelly phase.
I was bored in between classes and as it was the first week of the semester when add drop happens and traffic is horrendous, I just stayed out. There really was no need for me to leave. Especially since I had scheduled another class in an hour.
That was how I found myself watching a YouTube video with a commentary about the game in question. Now the announcers might be speaking oddly, but perhaps you'll understand it when you get to know the game better.
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"So, you've got your jungle working through all of the more side pieces, and you would think that he is going to come out and do an early gank. But then he sees that you're two on bottom are just waiting for something and he decides to peace out of the location."
"Yeah, it's like they just need to pin their enemy down and divide and conquer. Then a bit of a stun and there's your gank."
They went on a little bit about the tactical analysis of how they will be steamrolling one side or the other and while I understood it partially, I just wanted to play the game.
Would it be great to understand all the nuances and the ins and outs? Yes. I wasn't going to get it all from a podcast with two white guys talking about it? No, probably not.
In case you're wondering, this sounds like a very technical sport and when I say sport, I'm talking about esports the electronic sports. It's the way of the future because you can train in it and get better and train against other people. It gives people the real leveling field when so many people have debilitating conditions that mean that they can't just run around all day on a soccer pitch.
So, when my marketing class came in, I welcomed them with open arms giving the spiel about welcome to the class with professor Thomas and went right back into it. Honestly it was good to go deep into the topics again with some fresh fried and bushel youngsters. This one was a course for second year sophomores or first years that already knew in their hearts that they were going to be business majors.
With no prerequisites, they could all slide into marketing and since it was a major elective for people that had picked business it was easy to slide in there.
Just like my DMs after finals were done.
Early on, I'd found that I had a limit of about three classes a day. Since most of the class I was talking to the class at least in the beginning I couldn't just do that. At some point in time a girl needs a break.
And a girl will get a break because this is not the 1900s.
But I had a strong hard limit of about two classes a day, maybe three and that was it. For that third one it would have to be one with a TA or something. I wasn't teaching high school which meant that everyone there actually wanted to be there. And that was one of the saving graces about community college.
It was all business about business.
When I was done for the day I got my ledger and I made my way back to my office. I was going to give them an hour of office hours. Mostly so I could get back to that video and commentary. Because the championship series was going to be starting up soon. For about the three months prior to December the current season was going to be in full swing and I was thinking about competing competition and what that would even entail.
I couldn't even get my squad up to play.
I texted the group chat:
Kelly: Hey anyone up for a good time tonight?
Amir: Why do you always make it sound like you want to get into it with one of us?
Stacey: It's because she does. Game on! Rawr!
Stacy and Amir and I had been playing games since we were in our teams. Now that we were well into our thirties, it was still fun, and our parents still were on our case about giving them grand babies.
Amir was a classical fuckboy who I knew only because his mom was like an auntie to me. He had a black book that was probably bigger than a phone book at this point, I was just glad that his skinny ass had never caught anything.
Stacy had gone to school with me and decided that she wanted to do something entirely different and become a divorce lawyer. That she'd gotten divorced right after she finished setting up her private practice has nothing to do with this, it’s just a little tidbit that I like to add about her.
Amir and Stacey had gone to law school together. He specialized in employment law, and I’ve like to say that both had kept me out of trouble if only because I didn’t want to have to call them to pick me up from jail. Your girl is classy.
Usually, we all did yoga a few times a week so we could catch up and then have brunch. The good thing about her working her own position meant that she could make her own hours. The good thing about me working at the school was that I knew exactly where my classes were and when I had to take off.
The one thing that no one tells you about being a small business owner or a small businessperson. Is that when you don't have a boss, your customer is your boss. Them and if things aren’t right then you might lose them. I'm not in the customer service business anymore because I value my own time and because I'm trying to get tenure.
Plus, I've been prepping to teach at four-year college as well. I'm trying to get up my chops, because you can't hack it in the real world, academia is still there for you.
Especially if you know a guy.
I got off work, took my notes and packed up everything and did my normal drive down route seventeen to get to home and cursed myself for not realizing that it was going to be packed on the first day of school. As soon as I could get off, I did.
I pulled into my apartment complex and with a deep sigh. I opened the door to my apartment. Inside the lovely, carpeted floor welcomed me with the temperature set warm enough that I could really appreciate it.
It had been too long since I had been in the sand.
I mean a week is too long for me. If I could do anything about that, I would make a nice easy commute from Trinidad to New Jersey. But no, no one has approved my teleportation tunnel/ cruise thing, so here I am having to commute.
I logged on to play with my friends, sliding my headset into place and it was on.
There's a thing about playing with somebody with a type, A personality.
Stacey being type a meant that she is very communicative and that she wants to win. Badly.
On the internet, no one knows your lawyer or a business school professor.
But on the internet, everyone knows that you're a fuckboy.
"I'm going to go fuck your dad and give him the child that he really deserves!" Stacey said on the common channel.
We were winning. Stacy just loved to rub it in.
See there's a snowball effect that happens. When you can kill a few of the opponents. You kill an opponent; you get a little bit more experience and gold than you expect. This means you can buy more stuff. You have an advantage in levels which means it's easier for you to kill them again. Rinse and repeat and sooner or later, you're two levels above your opponent and every time they see you, they're running away.
I launched a fireball at the nearest competitor only to see them immediately moving away. Their health bar was low which normally meant that they should not be nearby me. But I was a sneaky bitch.
They did not expect me to wait in the bushes. I had expected them to check because I'd already killed him once by hiding in plain sight. You see, I like to play as a jungle character. I know I know, It's not the most glamorous of roles. But I like the feeling of showing up at the wrong time in the right place.
Because that is when the magic happens. That is when I get to gank mother fuckers, getting me that snowball effect that has absolutely nothing to do with cocaine.
That evening as we played a couple games, I thought about the new esports program and how I was going to implement it. It was something that had been kicking around the back of my head.
Because defense of the Fall was a free-to-play game that meant that the barrier was very low to entry. This meant that if there were contest winnings, it came out of the money that people paid to the company to buy skins and other things that were non-game affecting. You couldn't have someone paying to win. That would have killed the competitive scene. What you had now was a scene where people who performed at a top level were able to get the notice of the game company and get custom skins made. And they might get a little kickback from that skin, further giving back to the community but also saying that hey if you do well then maybe someday you might be able to have us make a custom skin of your character.
It was all good fun. We kept playing up until the time when Stacy couldn't put it off. Her busy work in the morning.
A girl's got to eat after all and sleep and bitch about shit.