Consider this post a Thank you letter
(enter sap story here)
In February 2020 I was incredibly unhappy at my job as the chef of a Korean restaurant. Horrible hours, horrible pay, and a toxic AF environment were just part of my day to day. As anyone who has worked in a kitchen can tell you, it sucks. Hard. The only reason we do it is because kitchens somehow attract the greatest kinds of humans. You can ask any grumpy, divorced, retired chef why they chose such a terrible career and they'll answer the same thing every time: Because of the people. However, at my job everyone spoke Korean so after 2 years or so I was done! I decided to call it quits even though I was in a very precarious financial situation, a 9 month old baby, and a wife that was in school. But fuck it, money isn't the most important thing in the world. So I quit!
I'm not sure if any of you remember but, uh, march 2020 sucked. So finding a job was basically impossible, and to top it off I didn't qualify for any government pandemic handouts because I had quit my job (Literally a week before Canada shut down). So My precarious financial situation became a lot more... precarious. That was until I discovered crypto....
I spent basically all my spare time while my kid was napping reading, cross referencing, listening to podcasts, watching video, doing basically all I could do to figure out what this "cryptocurrency" thing was. After about half a year or so of reading I decided to jump in. Early march 2021 or beginning of April I believe. Markets were green, life was good, started to feel like I could breathe again.... Then May happened.
However if I had learnt anything in that half a year or so of reading is that this was the future (I hope) so I kept at it. Putting all I could scrounge together into crypto and just cross my fingers that everything will be alright. I made a couple of really good calls during June and things finally started turning around. At least for that part of my life.
Crypto became my passion but I had no one to share this with. My wife couldn't possibly care less even if she tried, and because I only recently arrived in a new city I don't really have a social circle here. So being in lockdown and spending literally every waking minute with my Wife and kid, you can very quickly start feeling really lonely. I've tried playing games online with my friends from back home but everyone gets caught up in this game we call "Life" that people have a hard time finding time to sit on their computers and game. So I slowly started spiraling into a sort of depression. Stopped doing the things I loved, and instead opted to just scroll through reddit all day and waste my life. I was angry all the time, and just not very pleasant to be around. What I needed was to find a community of people, that had the same passions, hobbies and views on the world but finding this during a pandemic is proving to be quite difficult.
That is until one day I stumbled across Splinterlands. What at a first glance seemed like a boring card game, quickly sucked me in. I would play during my spare time and found it quite entertaining, and very rewarding. One day I decided that I would love that extra 2% DEC bonus so I went out hunting for a Guild. And that's where I found the PIZZA Community.
These guys are amazing and I'm not just saying that to kiss ass. This group of people (not just the Splinterlands part, but the community as a whole) have basically changed the way I view gaming, crypto and online communities. They are incredibly helpful, and knowledgeable about everything that is HIVE related. I came to them as a Hive Noob and they've taken me under their wing and helped me navigate this blockchain and opened my eyes to all the opportunities that are available. So I figured it was only suitable that my first post here would be to thank these guys for everything they've done. I'm sure all my questions are probably annoying and I may seem like a little kid that just follows you around all day, but thank you for having me. Thank you for including me in your guild, thanks for the plethora of knowledge that you've sent my way, the countless delegations for brawls and EoS, the random gaming get togethers, the airdrops, the gifs, and most of all.... The $PIZZA. Keep being you, Pizza Crew. You've got yourself another fanboy.
-Burnt out Chef