Easy Money
Roll up, roll up!
I have never worked harder than when chasing easy money.
Maybe it was the result of being brought up in a household where backing horses was presented unchallenged as a viable way to secure a fortune. Maybe gambling is just a convenient focus for a generalised tendency to obsessive behaviour. Whatever the cause, it took root early and has grown steadily stronger through the years.
Early on in married life, my wife was bemused but tolerant as I chased around the North-East, piecing together the clues to a puzzle published by a local newspaper. I could visualise so well the effect on our student penury of the five thousand pound prize.
My ability to envision the upside but remain hazy about the downside has always been a problem.
The chase culminated in my camping out at midnight by the newspaper offices, waiting for the first edition, then chasing round woodlands at dead of night trying to find the final token. It was hard to accept that someone beat me not by hours, but by weeks, having cracked the code way ahead of anyone else.
Karen was somewhat more sceptical when I insisted on flying to the Isle of Man, convinced that I knew the location of a hidden Faberge egg, valued again at five thousand pounds. I headed off with a folding spade and rucksack, ready to dig up the treasure on the summit of Snaefell.
I took the Manx Airlines flight from Blackpool, where the co-pilot unstrapped herself after take-off and became the stewardess, passing round boiled sweets and biscuits in lieu of an in-flight meal.
The next day, on Snaefell, gale force winds whipped flurries of snow around me as I tried to penetrate the icy crust of the mountaintop, bending the flimsy camping spade in the process. I returned home empty-handed and only temporarily crestfallen.
Optimism is the curse of my life. I always have the conviction that a bad situation can be made good, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I bounce back.
This is bad enough when it makes me enter occasional competitions and treasure hunts. When I started gambling proper, it became altogether more serious. But what really sank me was developing the conviction that I could make my fortune from spread betting on the financial markets.
You see, I have committed career suicide not once, but twice. There’s the first time, which I’ll get around to talking about, where I blew the whistle on my boss’s shenanigans. Then there was the time much later, after I had managed finally to rebuild my career, when I gave up a wonderfully secure job, in a Firm where I had developed a comfortable niche, in order to throw my newly-banked bonus at the market.
I lasted about four days before I retired, bruised and battered from my trading career, and started to look for proper work again.
That was the last time I told Karen up-front what I was getting into (persevering in the teeth of her vehement opposition). Since then I have run up similar losses in a more clandestine fashion, having to have the truth dragged out of me kicking and screaming only when it was no longer deniable.
For with every weakness I have developed, I have also developed the means to hide that weakness from public scrutiny. Surreptitious overdrafts, alibis supplied by friends, barefaced lying. It all serves to keep the truth at bay for a little longer, so that I don’t have to endure that uncomfortable conversation I’ve been dreading.
So one year was dominated by the spread-betting fiasco, the next I managed to run up a similar sum on the quiet, trying to win money with online horse-racing bets. This year has been the time for roulette systems to grab my attention. I try to simulate the systems in action by using Excel spreadsheets with randomizer functions, then I ignore the results and try the systems out with real money anyway.
The positive filter of the optimist’s brain gets to work, blanking out the losses and fastening on the occasional wins. But with this obsession, neither winning nor losing delivers the satisfaction I crave.
As Luigi tells me over and over at Gamblers Anonymous “When you win, you want to win more, when you lose, you want to get it back”.
Many thanks for reading!
More ill-advised shenanigans below:
