When I lived in Florida doing programming for game servers & game development using Unreal Engine 4 I worked at 7-Eleven, Dollar General, and a little game shop called Glass Cabinet Hobbies
( Look them up, they were easily the best job I had ). During my time working, programming, and gaming with my girlfriend I saved up 1,800$ for a car and to move to California to be with my girlfriend pursuing my hobby and dream of Game Development.
A week before I was supposed to leave I pulled my back working at 7-Eleven moving a shipping container of food and contacted the manager 1 hour and 45 minutes into my shift to ask for someone to come in to cover my shift. ( The shift started at 10PM / 22:00 ). I waited to try to finish all the things I could and expected my manager to contact me back soon because I explained it was an emergency. A little over an hour and a half after the first few messages I tried to message again since I started to feel dizzy, light-headed, and couldn't stand up after sitting down behind the register for a moment to drink water. Finally, 3AM came around and I decided to call her. When she answered she said, "Sorry, I was asleep I will be in there as soon as I can". ( My shift ends at 6:00 or 7:00 if I am asked to stay late ) So I wait for thirty minutes, then an hour comes around, then two hours, and I text her again and got no response. Finally at 7:30 she comes in ( My Co-Worker showed up at 6:00 ) and she started giving me attitude about everything that was supposed to be done even though she told me hours ago to "Sit behind the register until I come in". She then told me I can count my drawer and leave, then continued to ask me over text 2 hours later ( While she knows I am sleeping ) if I can come into work tomorrow even though I had already told her that I was probably going to the ER or the hospital.
Eventually, I ended up moving to Jamestown to help my friend from Highschool who I had been looking after like a brother since he was in 9th Grade. Before I came over on the flight he said he needed help to pay rent once I got here and explained that our other friend had also moved up from Miami to help him. Once I arrived in Jamestown, NY however I was surprised with him not having electricity and he said "Oh, it was just on last week. Let me contact them later." and for a week me and his best friend lived together in the house with no electric walking ten miles a day looking for jobs.
After the first week, I had given him money to "Help him pay rent" which had then been told to me that it was overdue. After the second week of being with no electric, no hot water, and no way to cook any food, I found a stack of letters at the door, myself and his best friend started looking through them to find out he owed two months rent along with over 700$ in overdue electricity bills. Along with some unpaid medical bills, ( All of which were already opened but placed off to the side and ignored completely ). When I confronted my friend about the money he had owed me and the unpaid bills he started to get extremely defensive and hostile. At this point in time, he owed me a debt of 1,225$ and a car which he had gotten seized for illegally parking it while I was out of the country months before. The conversation ended with me asking him to start paying me some money each month to help me save up and use it for food. He agreed and said it was reasonable and he would help out by starting to pay me back. A few days later we went out to get food and found out I was out of money. In three weeks of living here, 1,800$ was burnt through for the living expenses of my friend and his best friend along with the few bills he could get me to help him pay off. I talked to my friend and asked him to give us some money to pay for food and he said: "Man, I can't I gotta pay the rent".
After an extremely heated argument between the three of us, it was decided that he would pay me back 200$ a month somehow and we would figure out the details of it later when everything settles down a bit. The next few days I went out to the local Salvation Army to get assistance in getting food. That night I brought home over 100$ worth of food with the help of their food assistance program. I was a bit less stressed knowing I had food and didn't have to continue sitting on the corner with a sign saying "Looking for a job, will work for under minimum wage". The next day I walked past a kitchen I had been applying at almost every other day and the hiring manager came out before I could walk in and talked to me for a second. He explained that "No one is going to hire you around here because the Crack-heads are doing all the work for half of the minimum wage under-the-table". I explained that I was from Florida and even if they paid me 8.25$ an hour I would work for them. He told me that he couldn't be okay with treating me like them but he doesn't have enough to hire me as a regular. I told him it was okay and continued looking for jobs for the next week. At the end of the week, I asked my roommate when he was going to pay me and he started telling me that he doesn't have money to pay me back because he has to pay his electric bill first and his rent. I was furious, I walked all the way across town to visit his mother's house where he "worked" for her. When I got there his best friend was there also and talked to them both in what became a very heated argument where I was asked why I didn't have a job because I wasn't trying hard enough and I needed to be making money to help with rent. By the end of the argument he and his best friend told me not to buy anything for them anymore and I responded "The issue isn't paying for your food or helping you get by, the issue is I dropped all my money coming over here and helping you because you said you could pay me back and we could move over to California at the end of this month!" My friend agreed to pay me 200$ a month yet again and I walked all the way back home. Over the next 3 days, his friend didn't come back to the house to sleep and neither did he. The next day I found out that his best friend was moving back to Miami because "He didn't want to live like this". Four days later I was cooking rice in a home-made fireplace with no butter so some rice stuck to the bottom of the pan and started burning, I opened all the windows and let out the smoke from the rice when a neighbor walked up the stairs and asked if everything was okay. I explained that the rice had burnt on the stove and it was fine before asking if I could use their stove to cook it really quick or I could give them the rest of the rice in the bag for a cooked bowl. He nodded and walked away without answering any of my questions so I finished putting everything away before walking outside and into town to try to find some way to get food. I came back about an hour later and my friend was there telling me I had to leave and that the landlord kicked me out. That was last night, I woke up this morning and had to pack all of my things up before leaving the house and going to a friend's house I had met applying for Tim Hortons. He let me relax there for a few hours until we decided that I should make this GoFundMe and ask for help. He told me that "If there are any good people out there who care they will be the ones who help you". Anything you can send helps, I am grateful to be able to use the library computer to create this page and even be able to talk to my girlfriend for a bit while doing it.
If you are in need of a Game Developer, Programmer, Game Designer, or anything as such and you are willing to help by negotiating some kind of work I can do to help me get started on getting a house again then please contact me. I will re-learn any programming languages I know and even learn new ones if it's required. Please help me so I can get my life back on track. My end goal for a dream is to develop a game that will change the gaming industry forever. I want to be able to make anyone who plays my game happy and gives them a place to be free.
Thanks for reading, sorry it's so long! Anything helps.
~Josh ( Bunnie ) Haikonen
Email & PayPal: JeittKaiser@gmail.com
GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/honorme
Comments
Post a Comment