The RFID Card

I don't exactly remember what year in high school it was, but there was a kid in my class, let's call him Scott, that somehow somewhere was able to obtain one of the RFID cards that would get anyone entry into the school. Essentially, an RFID card is a plastic card with a chip inside and a coil. When the card is placed near a sensor, the electromagnetic field that the sensor puts out is inducted through the card's coil, and power is fed to the chip inside. The chip then emits a wireless string of numbers that the sensor receives, and then either accepts or rejects the card. If it accepts the card, the door unlocks. The doors could be opened simply by holding your wallet with the card inside up to the sensor. Getting this card was one hell of an achievement, and came before I ever got the master key. He realized that he now had quite a bit of power, and wanted to sell it. He had no idea how to copy these cards, and so came to me, one of the nerdier kids of the class. I did a bit of research and found that he could buy an Arduino microcontroller and an RFID read/write shield and be able to read, store, copy and write RFID cards. He bought everything he needed, totaling about $70. I helped him write and set up the code, and load it onto the Arduino. After that, we were successful in reading the number emitted by the RFID card, and then store and write that number to writable cards that he had bought with the Arduino. Once we successfully wrote and tested our first card, we felt very accomplished, but also realized that some people could actually do a lot of unnecessary harm to the school, and so I backed out. Scott decided to go on his own and sell the cards himself, leaving me completely out of it, which I was very happy about. He sold a few cards, I don't recall for how much, and apparently made some decent money. As always, though, some people weren't careful enough, and the whole scheme was taken down by the administration. I'm sure that there are still a few people out there that have a card (at least I do), and surely it will come in handy come senior prank time. Scott had an out of school suspension for three days, and was "sentenced" to an extra 30 hours of community service inside the school. At the time, a lot of people were actually expecting him to get kicked out, but he graduated along with me a year or two later. It was a fun time, but that is an example of a failed business startup. That taught me a valuable lesson, if you're going to start a business, at least let it be legal.

The Locker Based Business

At the end of each school year, the office of the Dean of Students would send out a notice letting students that the time has come for requesting lockers. Each grade has its own floor; juniors have the bottom floor, freshmen the second, seniors the third and sophomores the fourth. There were clusters of lockers scattered on each floor, one assigned to each student. When requesting lockers, we could request a part of the floor and a top or bottom locker at that area. Freshman and sophomore year I was given a bottom locker and I was really sick of it by the time junior year came around. I had requested a top locker, but it had apparently been denied as I was given an even numbered locker. I really, really didn't want a bottom locker, and was prepared to fight for one on top. I went to the office of the Dean of Students and complained, but the employees there told me that there was, of course, nothing they could do. I then got my cross country coach, a personal friend of mine, to write a letter to the office explaining that I was injured and my knees were in bad shape, and I shouldn't be kneeling several times a day (there was a morsel of truth to that). The office then later informed me that I was given another locker assignment. It was the locker directly above my older one, which pissed me off because that one had been empty the whole time. Now I had a good locker and then an "extra" right below mine. They never changed the combination, so for a while I enjoyed the space of having two lockers. A friend of mine, let's call him Scott again, said that maybe we should put drinks and food in there and just share it between a few of us; a private food storage locker. I thought that was a great idea, and so we went to Shaw's and picked up Mountain Dew, chips and candy, the bare essentials of course. We enjoyed that for a while, until Scott thought that maybe we could make a bit of money selling what was in my extra locker. I, again, thought that was a great idea, and that was the foundation for our "business." We decided we would sell Monster and Mountain Dew out of there, the drinks high school kids live on. It was surprisingly profitable. We sold Mountain Dew for $1/can, which we bought for about $0.60 . We sold the Monster for $4/can, or $6/2 cans, $9/3 cans, etc. We sold the Monster for $4 for the first, and $3 per each can in "bulk," but made it look like they were getting a deal when really we were completely ripping everybody off. It may seem absurd to buy a single drink for $4, and it is, but the cafeteria didn't offer it and we did. Supply and demand is very very convenient when you're the only supplier. We continued this for no more than a month. It got pretty big and we were supplying the locker with 24-packs every other day. As with all good things, however, it came to an end. The administration of course found out about it, and they weren't happy. They told us that Chartwells, the company that supplies the school with lunches and drinks, were the only ones allowed to sell food and beverages at the school. We declared that it was a monopoly and needed to be destroyed (now we're just screwing with the school). They then told us that we weren't allowed to run businesses on school property, and it would be best if we stopped. We reluctantly agreed.