How Online Game Saved My Life (well, kinda)

Question: How do you live for four days on three dollars when you’re living in a completely empty apartment, and know absolutely nobody?

The answer: Online Game.

As you may know, Cajun’s online game book is coming out this week, and I can’t recommend it enough. Not just because I contributed a chapter, but because I’ve used a lot of the techniques that Cajun describes in his book and I can testify to the fact that they’re awesome. In fact, Cajun’s online game advice actually enabled me to survive one weekend when I was trapped in Vancouver with no money, no friends, and nothing but an empty room to live in. I guess you can’t say it saved my life, because I don’t think you can starve in just four days, but his advice definitely saved me from being damn hungry.

Gosh, where will I start:

It was Labor day long weekend, and I was moving to Vancouver to attend graduate school. The cab dropped me off at my nice new empty apartment in my nice new neighborhood in a nice new city.  I pulled out my wallet to pay the cab driver. The fare was $17, and all I had in my wallet was a twenty.

Literally. There was just a twenty, and my driver’s license. Everything else was gone.

I won’t go into a lot of detail into how I managed to lose both my credit card and my bank card at the beginning of a long weekend, right when I was moving to a new city where I had nothing and knew nobody. But let’s just say that my goodbye party back in Toronto was pretty damn wild, and I also lost a pair of shoes, a jacket and my ability to drink tequila without retching.

The Cab driver was still looking at me, so I handed over the twenty dollar bill.  “Sorry, buddy, no tip” I said to him, knowing that this three dollars change was going to have to last me the whole long weekend, until the banks opened on Tuesday (it was Friday morning).

I pulled my bags out of the trunk, threw them in my new, empty apartment, and sat down on the floor. I had three bucks, the banks were closed for the long weekend, I had no food in the fridge; I didn’t even have a couch I could rifle through for change.

I took my three bucks and went to the grocery store, and bought three cans of beans and a can of tuna. I figured that would keep me alive for four days. Of course, I soon realized that I didn’t have a can opener at my new apartment.

I’m a pretty resourceful guy, so I guess I could have just bashed open the cans of beans with a rock or something, but that would be undignified. Thankfully, I had my laptop with me, so I hatched a plan. I found a nearby unsecured wi-fi network, and set to work trying to get myself fed.

There’s nothing like a little bit of hunger, and a lot of boredom to motivate you. I sat in my little empty room and vigorously updated my online dating profile. I changed my location to Vancouver, wrote a few clever witty lines that would grab a woman’s attention, and then started going on the search feature and messaging women.

I think I had only sent about 5 messages when I got my first reply. By dinnertime, I had a girl driving in from out of town to pick me up and show me Vancouver. She knew about my predicament, and she was pretty cool about it – I told her I would get the second date.

Of course, it was completely humiliating. I actually asked the waiter for the leftovers in a doggy bag at the end of the date (Dating tip: never, ever do this, unless the only alternative is starvation). But she was actually a cool girl, and we had a good time.  By the time I made it home, I had two other messages from women who wanted to meet up with me. One of them even came over with a can opener.

What had started out as a huge disaster actually turned into a pretty fun (if slightly humbling) weekend. By the time the banks opened on Tuesday, I had made a few friends, and my dating life in Vancouver was already getting kind of busy.

All thanks to online game.

Cajun’s online game book is coming out this week, and you can get it here.