I'm No Charlie Dumbbucket!

 Here's a good example of how I roll:

Anybody know what that is? You might by now but on the day I took this pic (March 14th) only a few serious cardboard collectors knew what I'm about to tell you. I was one of them. 

Like Connor McDavid's career as a kid, Connor Bedard's was followed with interest by a few people. I would say most were trying to think of ways they could cash in on him and I am slightly guilty of that myself. I saw McDavid playing against kids much older than himself and skating circles around him between periods of a hockey game I was watching. Even Don Cherry said he was goina be a "beauty." At the time I remember thinking about getting his rookie card. It was mostly my hobby of collecting hockey cards but I admit that to some extent it was to make up for once pulling a Wayne Gretzky rookie card from a wax pack of 79/80 O-Pee-Chee hockey cards. I remember trading it away after getting off the school bus and walking home. I can't remember what I got for it but it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. One just recently sold for 3.75 million bucks. I only traded that card because I didn't know what a star he was going to be but the guy I traded it to was more knowledgeable and made a good trade. I was hoping I could do that with McDavid's rookie card. 

As fate would have it I was in China and missed all the McDavid rookie card fun. His Young Guns can be bought now for $1500. If it's graded a 10 maybe 4 or 5 thou. So I have no McDavid rookie cards and I don't believe I've opened a pack of 15/16 Upper Deck Series One to even have a chance at pulling one. I COULD buy a box for $1700 or a case of 12 for $22,000 but... now there's a NEW guy whose career I followed closely making his way up the ranks playing for the Regina Pats and the Canadian Jrs. I planned on getting in on HIS rookie card action to make up for missing out on Gretzky AND McDavid. I planned on buying a case of hobby boxes. They were going for around $1200 at one point. I figured his YG to be selling for a grand (which it DID for a while) so I'd get my money for the case back by selling one Bedard. Anything else would be gravy and in a case there is sure to be some gravy. But things did not go well in my year in Canada and I never had 1200 bux. I missed out on that just like the Gretzky and McDavid.

An Upper Deck hobby box costs $350 right now and that gives you a 6/50 chance to pull this card:

It's what all the hype is about. It was selling for a grand a couple weeks ago but now it's dropped to $650-$700. I regularly watch guys open cards on YouTube and I'd been noticing that the Series Two tins (pictured above) have 4 Young Guns each. So at that price (Walmart) of 90 bux a tin, I could buy four for $360 and have 16/50 chance of pulling this card! That's ten extra chances and with my hockey card luck I needed them! There are 50 young guns so that's where I get those fractions. If you buy a case (now going for $5,000) you will likely get one and I've seen some cases with two. Yer pretty much guaranteed one but not two. Why? Why would anyone spend that kind of dough on hockey cards? Well there are other Bedard cards. Some short prints are worth considerably more than a grand. In fact THIS happened:

Dave & Adams (who I hate) put a bounty on the outburst gold one of one. Here's what an Outburst Bedard YG looks like: 

You get one of those graded a perfect mint 10/10 and you can sell it for 10 grand! I've seen some Outburst reds for even more cuz they're rarer and even saw a YG Exclusive going for $543,539. Now there were pretty low odds of getting any of these sweet, sweet cards, but I wanted to give myself a chance. In fact the card I want the most is this one:

The one on the left has Bedard AND Leo Carlsson who is also supposed to be good. This is where I am a collector before a businessman. I want the one on the left MORE than the one on the right even though it's about 30 bucks compared with 700. So that's good for me! I reckoned I had a good shot at this card, Carlsson's YG or a couple other good ones like Zach Benson, Connor Zary... and there are usually some dark horses. You never know.

So now that I've lost 99% of the people who will read any of this, I will tell you that March 14th was the day before payday. I went back the next day and asked like half a dozen people for the key to the display case in the toy section. They're all morons, I'll just say that. But by the time I got to the area where the cards were the day before... not even 24 hours before... they were gone. Not just the cards, not even just the display case, the whole fucking toy section was gone!!! So I asked and found out it had been move way over to the other side of the store. I also asked that person for a key to the display case and she too said she'd take care of that for me. I got to the case and here's what I saw:

ALL UD Series 2 GONE! I waited forever for someone to get the key and even asked two more "workers" there and they said, "Yes, she has the key." then walked away. I didn't buy anything although I'm thinking I might just go online and buy his FIRST rookie card. Just like with the YG checklists, I sometimes disagree with the opinion makers in the hobby. I think THIS:

is the TRUE Connor Bedard rookie card because O Pee Chee came out before UD Series 2. It's the first card released with him marked as a rookie in his Chicago uni. At least I THINK it is... Anyhoo, I can just buy this card online for 40 bucks and save myself the agita of trying to get lucky and pull a Bedard. I'll probably buy that checklist too. And while I'm at it I might just buy Connor McDavid's YG checklist card with Sam Bennett. They're safer, cheaper, and cooler, at least to me. 

What do I mean by "safer?" Well there are all kinds of shenanigans like there always are when something good gets fucked up by greed. My favourite hobby is a good example. Here are some of the things that are just despicable that are taking place right now:

1. That bounty? The thing that has made collectors and people who have never bought a pack of hockey cards and probably can't even pronounce "Bedard" all feel like Charlie Bucket from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That golden ticket (the one of one gold Bedard Outburst) has probably been found and it wasn't an innocent, poor Charlie Bucket that got it. It was Augustus Gloop or Veruca Salt the rich, spoiled, gluttonous, greedy characters who got it. Some Charlie SCUMbucket followed Walmart trucks around and bought all the boxes, tins, and blasters before anyone else even had a chance. The golden ticket was probably found before the bounty was offered. But why would Dave and Adam publicize their purchase? They also SELL hockey cards and this would cause prices to plummet. Of course there's no chance of finding that golden outburst but Charlie Dumbbuckets and Charlie Badluckbuckets all over the world are still blowing money on boxes that are being sold at hideously marked up prices. In fact Dave and Adam probably found the lucky person who pulled that card, paid him/her 100 grand and THEN put out the fake bounty so they (and every other hobby shop in the world) could shamelessly price the poor and the REAL collectors right the hell out of pulling a Bedard rookie card. 

2. Charlie opened three chocolate bars. One for his birthday, one his grampa bought and one he bought with money he found in the street. If a person were to go into a hobby shop and buy three loose packs of the sets with Bedard rookies or McDavid rookies or even Gretzky rookies, the odds would be a LOT worse and the prices would be a LOT higher than they should be. You see, cards are NOT randomly inserted into packs or boxes or cases. The world just isn't comfortable with random people getting rich. Upper Deck packs cards in a way that makes it easier to predict which boxes or even cases are going to be the good ones. When you pull certain OTHER cards that are commonly grouped with the Bedard Young Guns, you don't sell the unopened packs or boxes. You wait till you pull Bedard. THEN you can be hostile and sell the other packs or boxes knowing the odds are drastically reduced that you'll find ANOTHER one. 

3. When the market was hot and Bedards were selling for a grand all the Charlie Scumbuckets were flipping them like there was no tomorrow knowing that the market would correct itself once it became flooded with these cards. I must admit to having a plan to do this myself but only for ONE card so I could pay for most of my case. I also found out that it's not possible for just any Charlie Gutterbucket to do. You have to pre-order the cases months and months in advance and even if you know a place to do that, they will probably tell you the cases are sold out if they don't know you. Or if they want to just buy them all for themselves. I suppose I could have tried to buy cases online directly from Upper Deck - I just didn't have the money at the time.

You might not believe this but what irritates me most about all of this is that so many of us will look at the situation and say, "I can't blame Upper Deck or Dave and Adam or the hobby shops everywhere. It's just business. If they didn't do it..." and yaddah yaddah blabbety fuckin blah. We're so Pavlovian! We KNOW this is wrong but we just shrug it off. It's so sad to see!

So anyway, for the third time, for the three biggest names in my favourite hobby, I lost out. I mean I COULD go out and buy $350 boxes or even a $5000 case. Bedard looks to be the real thing and I might get some good cards other than his YG. Maybe even enough to make the prices worth it in the long run. But I'm no Charlie Dumbbucket, I like the cheaper cards better than the cards that are being hyped right now. I'll just lose the thrill of PULLING them. 

Having said that... the prices of O-Pee-Chee boxes have gone way down since UD Series 2 came out. I might go out and get some of those and try to pull what I reckon to be the REAL Bedard rookie card.

Now that I've said that those boxes will all disappear and the price will jump up again. I just can't win...

However, I am now finished my 10th master's course and aced it. Another mark in the 90's. Probably 95. I am going to finish my online teaching certification from Avenue either today or tomorrow and that will help me land one of the new courses that will be up for grabs at the end of the month. With increased hours I will be able to get a place of my own (hopefully, and hopefully near the school). They got a taste of what a guy like me can do when he isn't forced into the pedantic, didactic, overcontrolled "teaching" we are forced to do where I work. We can do fun stuff like this:

We were talking about excuses for missing work or being late or not going to a party and I thought we should have more situations when you might need an excuse so I gave the class these and told them to think of excuses. I was asked about an excuse I had made in the past so I told the class my story about my 75 dollar Honda Civic (note the fabulous artwork). It was my first car and I bought it in Calgary in '95ish. I washed it during a Chinook (warm winter wind) one day and by the next morning it was no longer warm. My wet car had frozen. I couldn't open either door but the hatchback opened so I crawled in and tried to start it up and go to work. It wouldn't start. I tried to get out to do something but neither door would open and the hatchback doesn't open from the inside. I was trapped. Right in front of my Mom's place (where I was staying for a while). No cell phones back then really. I just sat in the car and froze for a while till I saw Mom look out the window. She was on the phone with my boss, the ornery Stuart Bruinsma who never really SAID anything while we worked together, he just YELLED. So I got busted outta my car, got it started and drove to work. I thought Stuart would chew my head off but he just laughed. (The class laughed at the story too) Then they got to work in groups thinking up excuses for the scenarios I had found the night before on the internet. Could I do this in a normal class? Hell no! We have to justify everything against PBLA benchmarks, competencies, and guidelines. I would also have to create an assessment and get it passed before putting it on CHAD our kinda LMS where we post all assessments and attendance and such. It's ONE of the many ways they keep track of everything we do.

 I know at least one of my students will be talking to the big bosses about how good my teaching is. Maybe more. So I may have that working for me cuz the new classes will not be overlorded by the PBLA. We can teach normally. That will also make them extremely popular among the other teachers so there will be heavy competition for those classes. I'm hoping there won't be any shenanigans like with Upper Deck. I'm hoping I won't have to settle for keeping my one class and shrug it off saying, "Oh well, that's business." I'm hoping there won't be favouritism or sexism or some other kind of ism that keeps me from getting one or two of these classes. I can't get benefits if I don't get at least two of them. So I may not be able to keep the job if I don't.

I should be finding out soon if I get a new class or not.

For now it's just finish the online certification (which is supposed to take 4 hours but will take considerably more) then I'm off till April 15th.

Hopefully I'll be working full time by then. Over a year and still not able to find a full time job. And folks wonder why I keep hightailing it outta this country. It could happen again.

We shall see...