Quit whining and get a job.

Quit whining and get a job.

I kid you not, I used to pick flowers for a living. Being a beautiful and talented warlock can put quite a damper on the pockets some days, and being low on funds is a situation no gnome worth her salt can withstand. So I would run circles around Redridge Mountains or Stranglethorn Vale hunting herbs and weeds and vines, happily collecting them in bags while my demon-slaves and/or teammates covered my back by allowing themselves to be mauled by tigers. Then I would sell everything off to lazy alchemists and spend the profts on a new pet or a pretty robe or something.

That’s a pretty good way to sustain yourself, I guess, but I simply couldn’t accept being average like everyone else. I had to be better. Well, I mean, I already am better than most people, because they’re not warlock-y enough. In this case, what I mean is, I wanted to be way, way richer than the poor schlubs who pick flowers or break up rocks or skin donkeys for a living. I had to find a way to stop working for money, and start making my money work for me.

I am happy to say that now, not only am I filthy rich, but people are starting to take notice of my fabulous business sense. Like the scam I pulled the other day, where some slob wasn’t paying attention to his stupid self, and listed like eight pounds of core leather for just over 16 gold. Now, of course a pretty young lady like myself with perfect fashion sense is used to seeing knock-offs in store windows, so my natural response was that this was some kind of cheap, mass-produced product and not genuine core leather. So I asked the auction-elf about it, and he confirmed that it was the genuine article. I know he wasn’t lying to me because I had Kal’rath dangle him by his ankle off the roof of the auction house before I asked.

So I snap up this stack of nasty animal skin and re-list each pound at its actual market price. An expected return on this investment was over ten times what I had paid, so I was sitting pretty to be a happy warlock indeed. And holy baloney did it ever sell fast; so fast, in fact, that some boner actually asked me to cancel the auctions and sell him the stuff under the table, because he was afraid they’d all be gone before he could raise funds to bid on them himself.

And then the angry letter! Oh man, this is my favorite part. The schmuck who originally listed the auction sent me a nasty note, blubbering about how he accidentially set the price of his leather too low, that he meant 160 gold, not 16, and that I owed him the difference. I tell you, if I weren’t a registered card-carrying member of the Alliance (for tax purposes only I assure you) I would have hunted the dolt down and cut his knees off. I sent him one silver, enough for him to go out and get a clue, and laughed my way to the bank.

In the end, I guess it’s not enough to just be rich, after all; only by making my gold by preying on the idiocy and gullibility of others can I be truly secure in my business practices. Scamming people out of their mispriced auctions or just blatant lack of market knowledge is just one of the many, many ways I twist the denizens of Azeroth to do my bidding.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go pay some dwarf 50 gold to shave off his beard and make me a pair of slippers with it, for no reason other than I have the money to blow.