24. Coming soon, from Pixar...

Not a person, but a whole community. We live in a VERY rich school system, with loads of big money parents and their cocky “do you know my dad” kids. I’m one of the few who isn’t. Now, our baseball team has a team A and a team B, one which plays in an upper league, and one that plays in a lower league. Me and a few of my friends, who had all played since we were little, played team B, like we always do. But this year, our A team was filled with the richest brats, all of whom had $700 equipment, and bragged about how good they were. We won our league, and team A placed in the bottom of theirs. Now, to feel good about themselves(at least I assume), they scheduled an exhibition match with us. We got badly trash-talked during the whole pregame, about how all of our regular metal bats didn’t even COMPARE to their beautiful wooden ones with their names carved in Ana’s everything like that. Our coach told us not to hold back. We didn’t. Fastforward 4 innings, and it’s a forfeit from their coach, with a score of 13-0. They’ve gotten 2 people on base, but other then that, it’s been shutout pitching from my brother (I’m his catcher). We had stellar batting all around, and BOY, did we feel good about that retribution.

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23. This apple fell far from the tree.

There's this kid that lives in a house across the street from mine. It's a pretty large place: house is made of concrete, high ceilings, pool in the back, etc. Over the years, my brother and I have hung out with him a handful of times, but it's not so fun to hang out with a kid that's barely 11 when you're 14.

His mom is fairly wealthy, upper middle class. She's an engineer and makes quite a bit of money. So he benefited from this by being able to spend a majority of his free time staying inside playing video games when he wasn't at school. He didn't want to pursue a career, he just wanted lounge around all day. Long story short, he crashed the car that his mom gave him. His mom refused to buy him another one, and instead, used that situation to try and motivate him to get off his butt and work.

She sent him off to vocational school, since he doesn't want to go to college. We'll see how that goes.

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22. Some things are still based on merit.

I attended a very small middle school where most of the students were rich. There was one white girl in particular who was dropped off every morning in her parents Range Rover or huge Cadillac, was the first to have the first Juicy Couture Sidekick (we were so jealous lol), and had mini LV bags, Coach bags, and Dooney & Bourke bags when they were super popular (don't ask). She would always scrunch her nose when other classmates brought lunches that weren't pasta salads or sandwiches, she'd make it KNOWN that she was always chosen first for sports games and made those chosen last feel terrible, and would hand out invites to her exclusive birthday parties to just her friends in front of the entire class.

Anyway, in the area we lived, there's an exclusive all-girls high school that was notorious for being very selective with their students. Naturally, she wanted to get in super badly. Probably because she thought she was smart enough but also because her parents expected her to. 4 girls in our class (including me) took an extensive entrance exam and it turned out that we all got in except her! She lost it. She legit sulked in class and cried when our teacher made an announcement to congratulate us. I heard rumors that her parents tried to pay her way in, but she ended up just going to another school, so I'm not too sure how legit that rumor was.

Guess money can buy a lot of things, but not brains!

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21. Doctor no feel good.

A friend of mine from college whose parents were rich enough to have a multimillion dollar home in America and in Europe used to crap on me for saying I was happy to go to whatever medical school I could get into. I ended up getting into my state school and she responded by saying that she could get into that school in a second because her mom has connections in the admissions department but she would never bother applying there because it’s not even a good school. She also made the same claim that her mom could get her in to a specific top 20 ranked school. All through college she had this attitude with me about how even though I was doing better than her in classes, I was going to go to whatever school would take me and she was going to go to her dream school because that’s just how the world works. I checked up on her on Facebook this year and... she’s not exactly at her dream school. It turns out she is at her state medical school which is actually significantly lower ranked than the one she was making fun of me for attending. I don’t want to say I was hoping she wouldn’t get in anywhere because that’s a little harsh, but I was happy to see her get put in her place a little bit.

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20. Small fish, big pond.

Me. My family's financial situation was weird, so there was a time we were really doing extremely well. We had nannies, drivers and all that jazz but at the same time was super sheltered by my fam so I had zero social cues and tact. This equals to me being a mix of a spoiled brat + have really no clue I was acting like one. I also was very rude, didn't say thank you or please... Not because I didn't want to, I was just stupidly lazy to say them.

I have a cousin who is less privileged than me, she didn't like how I was spoilt obviously. We had a fight where I left her out on a playdate. And my stupid response was I'll buy her a chocolate milk and we should be friends again. She snapped at me publicly how I will never have friends if I think I can can just buy people off. At age 11 those words stuck to me. She also never grew close to me since then no matter how mindfully I tried.

Cruel twist of fate, I went to a private school with classmates who are millionaires or trust fund babies, 20x more richer than I am. because I was less white and less richer than them + fell into some financial hardships, I got bullied a lot for it.

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19. Going on a joy ride.

I went to school with a kid who always had a new fancy car or truck because his dad owned one of the biggest construction companies in the area. This kid was a major douche and double/triple parked his big trucks all the time. Once he got some sort of fast fancy car and went over 110 mph and was getting chased by state police. He had friends in the car that were telling him to stop and slow down but he wouldn’t. He ended up crashing into a business doing a ton of damage. He got hit with 3-4 felonies. Driving over 100 mph is a crime in most states and he got multiple kidnapping charges because the passengers were freaking out and he refused to stop when they asked. Dude never came back to school and I have no clue what he’s doing now.

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18. Downgraded to economy.

Friend in high school had two parents with pretty good jobs. She had a lot of name brand clothes, bags etc. She got a big solo trip abroad once a year. Her dad would buy the plane ticket and her mom would upgrade her to business class. I once invited her to come on a family vacation with me to Disneyworld. Note that this is a huge deal because we live so far away it takes 20+ hours and multiple airplanes to get there. She said "No thanks, it's really far away and I can't spend that long in economy class." Last time I invited her anywhere.
She was all set to go to a really prestigious, expensive university in Switzerland too, paid for by both her parents. Then her mom died. Her newly single-income household wasn't poor by any means, but all the little luxuries just weren't there anymore. She still gets her big trip abroad (barely), but it's only ever economy class now. She didn't get to Swiss university because her dad couldn't pay for it on his own.

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17. Worth it.

When I was little, my dad owned an exotic pet shop in Texas. A college girl comes in and tells him that she needs a sloth so her sorority can win a contest they were having to get the weirdest animal.

My dad says, "No, you don't want a sloth, it will destroy everything" but she insisted and said her daddy owned the city and would have him shut down if he didn't get her the sloth. So he told her to come back the next day.

So he talked to a lawyer and they drew up a long agreement saying he wasn't responsible for any damages, blah blah, and made her sign it and told her if she brought the sloth back, she'd have to pay shipping for it back to Brazil or wherever it came from.

So the sloth comes in and the girls come get it, and they're so excited, because they're gonna win.

The next day, she comes in crying. It had shredded her clothes, carpets, wallpaper, beds, furniture, everything. She tried to get my dad's shop to pay for the damages, tried not to pay the shipping going back, but she'd signed the contract. She tried to use her daddy about that, too, and mine said he could come down and see a copy of the agreement if he wanted.

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16. Too bad, eh?

Friend of a friend totalled his brand new luxury car by driving 2-3x the speed limit, plowed into some metal railings, and destroyed the front of several storefronts in a plaza. Fortunately this was the early hours of the morning and nobody was around to get hurt. He got out of his car and decided to just walk it off as he didn't care about the several hundred thousand dollars that the car cost. Cops found him, arrested him, you should have seen his shocked face when he realized that you can't bribe the cops as easily in Canada, and he got deported because he was on a student visa.

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15. Weird way to get a new timepiece.

I recently had a kid I suspect was trying to commit insurance fraud call the police on me. There are "protected bike lanes" on the campus my partner lives on, and they are full size lanes and to be treated as regular motor vehicle lanes. He was traveling against traffic on a boosted board. He was supposed to stop at an intersection and yield to me as the first to arrive. I started my turn from a complete stop as he suddenly flew into the intersection, got all the way past my car without an issue, and then threw himself on the ground. He jumped up and cussed me out yelling about how I, "Busted his watch," pulling some expensive watch out of his POCKET. To shorten the story, the police came and reprimanded him for being in the wrong lane and going out of turn, then apologized to me for wasting my time.

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14. What's yours is mine.

I had a snobby preteen come up to me once at a shopping center and tell me to give him my hoodie (nice wool knit I got for Christmas). Obviously I said no and started to walk off, then he offered me money. Still I said no and he started getting aggressive. Told him to go back to his parents and leave me alone.

He comes back to me with his mom who said she was calling security for "harrassing her child." I said sure, do it. Kid was real smug and told me I was screwed. It was kinda surreal to see someone like this IRL.

Security had the obvious response. Told kiddo and his mom to leave me alone. Mom argued about how the "staff" shouldn't act this way and how I should be fired for not directing her child to where to get my hoodie. Security guard told her to think hard about if I worked there or not.

She started poking him in the chest and demanding to speak to his superior. He had to lead them out of the mall.

Weird experience overall. Not a great ending but still a story I used to tell on dates and stuff.

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13. Not on the menu.

When I was in Americorps NCCC, we had 'houses' that had 6-10 people living in them (all from wildly different backgrounds) and a weekly grocery budget for the entire house.

One week, this rich vegan/granola-type kid was sent to do the shopping for the entire house and came back with like 3 bags of vegetables and 1/3rd of the grocery budget spent on Portobello mushrooms for a house of 7. Three roommates who all had poor upbringings and were facing the prospect of having a 200 calorie diet of luxury mushrooms for the next two weeks (a white kid from the Southside of Chicago, a black kid from Dallas and a Hispanic kid from Florida) all immediately formed a rainbow coalition and came within an inch of beating the kid up... but didn't. They did "explain", however, if that if you're feeding 7 people with $110 a week, you don't get to buy certain rich people foods.

He did wind up using his own money to keep everyone in Hot Pockets, Ramen and SpaghettoOs for the next week until the next grocery money was issued, but you did definitely see what happened when naive ran face first into reality.

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12. Nothing worse than public humiliation.

I had a kid in my senior class of high school who was an absolutely terrible person. His dad owned a construction company, and they had contracts with our city so they did very well for themselves. He was always talking down to anyone he wanted, but also he got his butt kicked a few times cause of it. Well he never did school work, was always getting kicked out of class for being a disturbance etc.

His dad one day came to the school, walked into his classroom and berated the crap out of him because the counselor told him that he had absolutely no way of graduating, and needed to enrol in a secondary school. He took his car keys, his phone, and all the allowance he had given him minus money for the bus. He left school a couple weeks later, and I believe he moved.

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11. Callous prank gets punished.

All throughout high school, for alphabetical reasons, my locker was right next to the son of the owner of a 200-store chain of convenience stores in our region. He was incredibly socially inept. I felt bad for him. We developed kind of a weird little friendship where we only ever talked at our lockers, but we had these little two-minute deep conversations. Mostly focused on him getting bullied, and me advising him to just chill out and stop running his mouth so much because that was why it was happening. He was obnoxious to classmates and teachers alike, and he reveled in it. He'd brag about his family's money and just generally play the part of a spoiled rich kid, almost like he felt like he had to. He liked being hated/envied, to some extent, but he also hated being an outcast.

He did listen when I told him about the stuff that was bothering me (I was shy and felt ignored and excluded all the time). There was absolutely a kernel of a good human being in him. He was actually an important person to me in a way... I never told anyone else about that stuff back then.

His behavior came back to bite him the week after what happened at Columbine. He decided to purchase and wear a black trenchcoat to school in the style of the school shooters. After a few days of him wearing that throughout the day, just to be a jerk, he got cornered by some kids and absolutely pummeled. They broke his nose and everything. He'd been basically asking for it, so I'm not sure what he expected.

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10. Becoming grateful.

I was walking to my car, wondering why my dad was being such a prick and wouldn't give me money to go have fun.

And as I was walking, in my clothes which my Dad bought for me, wearing my one-a-day contacts that my Dad buys every 6 months. I looked at my $14,000 car that I don't pay insurance or maintenance or even gas for, and as I got in, looking at my $300 phone, my life, my privilege.

I realized I had become a spoiled prick. All these possessions and still in my head I was making my Dad out to be the enemy.

I thought about all the money my Dad had invested into my future. He gives and works and toils and if he could read my mind, he would cry, because all I had were bad thoughts about how my Dad wasn't giving me everything I wanted.

He didn't have to read my mind though, to see me walk in the house every day, pass him by on the sofa, without even a glance, and lock myself in my room. How could it have come to this?

I felt truly humbled that day. I went back to the house, and gave my Dad a big hug, and then we spent the rest of the day watching TV. What he wanted all along, my company, I could finally give to him, without my mind being in another room. After that day I made an effort to never think bad thoughts about my Dad again, and I made an effort to treat him like a friend, and not an inconvenience of my life.

That was back when I was 19, now at 25, I just hope I've redeemed myself.

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9. From riches to rags.

There's a kid I went to school with, Saul, who has parents in politics. At one point his father was a senator. His family was super rich, but they also extended fully-loaded bank accounts to their kids to spend money for whatever, so he was always super cocky. He got along well with guys (didn't try to buy friends or anything), but Saul treated women so poorly. He referred to girls as objects and generally talked down to them. He did not respect relationships between other people and considered them doomed to fail at any moment.

Enter Alan, my friend who got a very serious girlfriend in high school. Saul was determined to ruin their relationship by wooing this girl with his money and status. The girl seemingly let him win her over, but in reality she was in it with her current boyfriend to get as much of his money as possible. She made him think she was cheating on her boyfriend with him and this really got Saul off. He never actually slept with her and at most he got a kiss on the cheek.

After 3 months of going on lavish dates to insanely expensive restaurants, doing luxury activities and also buying gifts for her, Saul starts telling her she has to leave my other friend and be with him. Girl tells him to buy her a car and she'll dump Alan. Now in the real world this would never be possible, but since Saul has a maxed out bank account and access to funds in his name, he takes this girl to a BMW dealership and buys her a car. They end up putting the title in her name and he gifts it to her.

Within the next week, this girl skips town entirely and my friends and I never saw her again. We have no idea if she went and sold the car or drove away with it and moved somewhere else. She even left Alan in the dust.

Saul ended up thinking this would be a small consequence at first, but when his parents found out what happened they pulled everything. They went from fully spoiling to disowning this kid. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but Saul spent some time homeless after he finished college. Biggest dose of reality imaginable. I think he's working in sales now and has a decent life. He moved out of state, so all I ever see about him is through social media.

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8. Not maid of money.

My mom was the doctor of one of the cleaning ladies at one rich girl from my school's house.

On a saturday, this girl threw a big party at her house while her parents were away. The other rich kids and the cool kids were invited (I was not). It was during X project movie popularity, and she promised that the party would be decadent. The next day, photos started to appear on facebook : everyone was out of it, everyone was kissing everyone, stuff was strewn all over the lawn, you could see a lot of vomit and broken things on the background, some kid decided to "cook" noodles in the jacuzzi and broke it by emptying every pack of ramen noodle in it... A big big mess. The girl replied to every picture with "haha yeah good luck to the maids".

On Monday, she went back to school, and instead of being her cocky self, she was real quiet and went home immediately after class, without saying anything.

When my mom went home this night, she told me she had a great story for me about this girl. Remember her awful comment about the "maids"? Well, the cleaning lady came to the house for her usual shift on Sunday morning and saw the mess. Rich girls barely wakes up from her hangover and tells her to clean it. Cleaning lady refuses, and rich girls says "if you don't, my parents will fire you."

So cleaning lady takes very detailed pictures of the house and send them to the girl's parents. 10 min later, rich girl's phone is ringing, and her parents yell at her that she is a disgrace and needs to clean everything, and that she won't have money, cellphone and computer until the end of high school. They also apologize profusely to the cleaning lady. So she's crying, and asks the cleaning lady to help her because she can't do it. She refuses and leaves, letting rich girl clean everything by herself. She then told my mother that the parents came to her flat during the evening, apoligizing again, calling their daughter an "ungrateful brat", and gave her a raise immediatly. Apparently, the jacuzzi was unusable for four months.

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7. Prejudice doesn't pay.

My parents were renovating our house with one mid-sized contractor in our city, the guy was a really nice guy, recommended by one of my dad’s best friends, but he really spoiled his kid (like he bought him a car that was worth half of what their house is probably worth) and the kid was a huge jerk, coincidentally, we were the same age.

Our parents kept trying to turns us into friends but it never worked, we were complete opposites. I was the kid next door kind of type, tall, skinny, a bit nerdy, gay, most of my friends were the smart-popular kind of type that didn’t give a crap about hanging out with a gay guy regardless what other douchebags would say.

The renovations lasted for almost a year and in the meantime his son started picking on me. He kept calling me gay like it was an insult and I mostly laughed it off. He was the type of kid that hung out only with massive dudes with expensive cars that were often uneducated, muscular, often dangerous, even felons. Which was weird because he was actually smart (at least on paper).

Anyway one night he saw me at a party making out with a guy, and he took a picture of us (we didn’t notice).

A few days later my parents met with the contractor and his kid decided to come with him too to deliver them “the news”, he said he was worried about what I am doing so he decided to take a picture of it and then went on to tell them that it’s important that they know so they can cure me.

My father kicked them both out and only paid him for the materials he put in the house because the guy kept insisting to get paid in cash so he evades taxes.

Years later I found out that because of this, the contractor had to sell his son’s car to get out of the red. That being said they’re both still highly religious homophobes.

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6. Professional moocher.

I had a brother-in-law (now gone due to his divorce). His parents were wealthy... from the dad's dad. So, grandpa was the original maker of the money.

Anyhow, the bro in law was a lazy piece of work with no ambition except to put an hour or two per week into his own "work" and act as if that was enough, while his mom and dad funded his "passions" (and his house, and his car, etc.) Keep in mind, this guy is 40-something at the time, and has a prestigious law degree, which he does not use. He has no savings, no property. Can't hammer a nail. And would probably drown in heavy rain.

So, his mom and dad got the idea to open a big business using grandpa's money...which they had inherited. They put about $15M into it to create it from scratch, which I believe 80-90% of their entire nugget. It went belly up within 6 months. They lost it all to the banks.

Now, I have nothing against his mom and dad, except for the fact that when we all got together, they relentlessly bragged about the Ivy League educations of their children. Ok, I take it back. They were pretentious. However, when they lost everything and the guy started to experience debt and living by credit card, he freaked out.

He said "I never realized how hard it is to get money". Which I thought was an odd way to phrase it. “Get money”. Instead of “earn money”. Yet he still did nothing for a long time. He moved debt around from credit card to credit card. Now, he has moved off and is practicing law. So at least he is, theoretically, not a parasite anymore (although he IS a lawyer).

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5. Paying for her father's sins.

My wife was evicted from her dorm in college, dropped from her classes for non-payment, and had her car repossessed. Her dad was a CEO of a fairly large company and had an income north of $1 million per year in the late 90s. The company was being bought out and the board members all stood to make a ton of money each. They did background checks on everyone and found out that her dad lied about his experience and education. He did not have an MBA from Stanford. He did not have any college. He did not play in the NFL. He was not a decorated war hero. So they fired him so they could split his slice of the buyout amongst themselves.

He never told his wife or daughter. He continued to run up debt and live the same lifestyle while being unemployed. He forged my mother-in-law's name on all sorts of loan and credit applications. Then, one day, he left them high and dry for a wealthy woman he had been having an affair with. He filed bankruptcy and managed, somehow, to get away pretty clean while leaving most of the debt in my mother-in-law's lap. My wife was completely ignorant of everything going on and her father said he was still paying for everything. Her world came apart and he ghosted her for years.

She gathered her composure and enrolled in community college. That is where we met. I taught her how to live a pretty decent life as a poor person. I had tons of experience being poor. Nearly two decades later, we are both making good money and have a family of our own. She learned a lot from that experience and has even reconciled with her dad. We keep him at an arm's length since he is a narcissist and a pathological liar but at least she has a relationship with her father.

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4. A rough awakening.

The first day my mission team drove into Tijuana, Mexico. We were high school students and had spent the first few days in LA "prepping" and most of the team still had this idea that we would spend 5 days in a poor area, save everyone and then go home with something amazing for our college applications.

Krista was this girl whose parents were wealthy, all the parties were at her house since they had a pool, her mom used to buy her 6 or 7 prom dresses and then return the ones she didn't like because it was "easier" than shopping and she was a two-faced witch. So we're crammed into this passenger van and the border crossing into Mexico is fine but as soon as we get to our neighborhood and Krista sees scrap wood with tarps which make up the homes and children playing half naked in streets made of dirt, when she realizes that the "water" coming down from the single bathroom isn't water, when a child happily hands her a gift, his favorite rock, she breaks.

She just completely broke down into tears and disbelief because her entire life had been sheltered from the reality of anything but the rich and spoiled.

I wish I could say it changed her into a better person but she remained a spoiled and self-centered person until I purposefully lost touch with her family. The real world can hit a rich kid but they can ignore the pain if they just focus hard enough on the car daddy promised to buy them.

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3. The Little Prince.

For a couple of years in high school I went to this super expensive American private school in Switzerland. The company my Dad worked for paid for almost all the tuition, so it was an amazing opportunity for me. Most of the kids in this school were either State Department or from American families living in Saudi (Saudi provided expat kids with school up until 10th grade, so you had to go to a school abroad to finish HS). There were however, a few Saudi kids that were there, mostly so that they would be able to speak flawless English to help out their future careers. One of these kids, who I will call The Prince, was somewhere in the line of Saudi succession, but honestly, he was like 1,455th in line for the throne. Not a real contender for King, but his family was rich. Like rich in a way that most of us can't even imagine.

This school had some rules, like you couldn't have a car as a student, even if you were old enough to get a license in Switzerland. This rule was a real buzzkill for The Prince, but he made it through the year somehow. Over the summer after his Junior year, he drove back to the school from Geneva in his Lambo, probably just because he could do it outside the school year. On his way up the mountain (the road is like a endless series of hairpin turns) he managed to flip his Lambo into a vineyard while trying to navigate one of those hair pin tuns. I'm guessing a Lambo has a lot of power, and he took it too hard.

His parents, furious at what he had done, decided to punish him by replacing his Lamborghini with a Porsche. And The Prince was SOOOO angry. He complained about it bitterly when the school year started up again. The rest of us kind of just looked at each other in amazement. Same planet, different worlds I guess.

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2. How the other half lives.

I went to a very expensive private elementary school. A friend of mine grew up very wealthy, her father a surgeon and mother a stay at home wife. They were very controlling of her and quite honestly, a little scary. They sheltered her to the extreme and she frequently repeated insane things they said verbatim because that was all she knew. If she was told to clean her room but left an item out upon her parents’ inspection, they would throw the item out, no matter what it was. Once it was something very sentimental to her (can’t remember what it was) and when she told me and I expressed sympathy, she said something like, “Oh no it’s okay, it’s my fault. If I told my children to clean their rooms but they didn’t and had their friends come over, their friends would go home and tell their parents about how much of a slob my family is and that can’t happen.” This was her concern at 10 years old.

When it came time for college, they sent her to an expensive, hard-to-get-into school and told her that her sole purpose there was to find a husband (specifically a doctor or an engineer) to keep her as a stay at home wife. She flat out told me this was her only purpose, which broke my heart because she is a smart person who was able to get into said-school to begin with and her parents should have been encouraging different goals for her.

Well, she found a boyfriend but at the end of her four years of undergrad, he turned out to be a cheating narcissistic douchebag (the narcissistic douchebag part was obvious to me from the get-go but she had no idea what a healthy relationship looked like, however the cheating was obvious enough to be a deal-breaker).

So instead of going straight to marriage (which disappointed her parents and they kicked her out of the house), she suddenly had to become solely independent, find a job and an apartment and is doing well for herself. She’s a totally different person now and has come a really long way.

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1. A heartwarming tale of redemption.

Not spoiled by any means, but a best friend of mine, extremely down to earth, a family of millionaires, suddenly had all his dad’s years of hard work and struggles taken away the day his grandfather was on his deathbed and named all his father’s companies to his uncles.

I’ve seen first hand at how much his father worked throughout our time in middle school together, through high school and so on. Every time I used to visit his place, his father had top executives at his house discussing business stuff, advising etc. He catapulted everything from one company and turned it into a conglomerate of sorts. My friend’s uncles though, who merely ran comparatively smaller businesses, that my friend’s father had helped them set up throughout the years, were doing decent work with it, but couldn’t compare themselves to what his father had actually built up over the years.

Anyway, everything took a turn for the worse when his grandfather signed the will and gave everything away and by everything, I mean the companies his father built up through decades and even all his properties, the lavish houses worth acres, all given away within mere hours.

My friend’s whole family, which included 5 other siblings, were to vacate their properties with immediate effect and were told to go back to the village they all originated from. They spent years living there, under some of the worst circumstances imaginable, his father tried his best to start off things from scratch but it all didn't go too well as they thought. His father went into depression and was given bed rest for a while.

They visited our city once after years, we hadn't been in touch because they couldn't afford cell phones back in those times. He called me up from a payphone the day he landed and I left work mid-day just to spend some time with him. We met up at a club and one could immediately tell how bad things were by his get up. I comforted him and ensured he didn't lose any hope and insisted that we take me to his rented place so I could meet his family after all these years. My heart sank and I literally held back tears when I entered his place and saw nothing but mattresses lying on the floor. Meantime, his mother walked in, all smiles as always trying her best to hide back those tears and offered me something to eat. I comforted her and my friends father, he shook my hand and all of a sudden, he couldn't hold back and started apologizing to me for the way I was being welcomed by them. As I held my tears back, I told him it was ok and he didn't have to worry about all this and I sat down right beside him and I managed to change the subject altogether. His mother started talking about videogames.

A little sidenote on my friend’s mother: She was an avid gamer, played almost every game they got their hands on back in the good days. Every family member owned a PS1 and had the biggest library of games I had ever seen. She often used to test my skills every time we went at it on Tekken. She was ACTUALLY pretty good!

Anyhow, we started talking games and I told her about all these new releases that I can't remember and that is when it hit me. Since I was working in a friend’s office, I borrowed one of the spare television sets at work, brought in my PS1 and gave her all the games I had. I couldnt recall the last time I had seen her this happy. She was ecstatic, she immediately plugged in and they all started going at it one by one. They stayed for about 12 days in the city before they had to leave and I told his mother she could keep my PS1 to keep herself busy whenever she felt down.

Years went by, his uncles never contacted them, they kept going on with their lives, destroyed all the businesses that were given and eventually filed for bankruptcy about 3 years ago. Fast forward to today, after another struggle that went on for years to come after I met my friend and his family here, today they stand on their own feet once again. Having went into the real estate industry and are regarded as some of the most trustworthy and well reputed people in their line of work. I am yet to meet his family because they’ve moved to a different city and with projects going on in various cities at once, my friend often drops by and we meet up, talk about all the times he has seen and I’m just sitting there beaming with pride on his and his family’s accomplishments after a struggle that people literally give up on. His family never did, his younger siblings, now all grown up, help run the real estate firm and are now just as invested in their business as their father had hoped for. Back on track and living the best time of their lives, yet again! My friend’s getting married in a couple of months too and I’m excited to meet everyone all over again in these times and cherish every moment. Specifically, I’m really looking forward to talking games with his mother, who he still says is playing on the daily!