Exploited I
“You’re a good person Damien…” The Charity rep said. “What did you say your last name was?”
“Lucifer.” I said.
The rep smiled. “Damien Lucifer. Good man. Better man than me.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself.” I said, trying to live up to this stranger’s praise. “You work at a charity. How bad can you be?”
The rep typed as he talked. “I work on commission, so as far as I’m concerned, you’re the best man in the world right now Mr. Lucifer.”
I didn’t know how I felt about that. He was a nice enough guy, sure, but I didn’t want my charity money going to him. He wasn’t who I was trying to help.
“Don’t worry,” the man said as if he could read my mind, “my cut comes straight from the government. All of yours goes straight to the student, we don’t even handle it.”
“Do I have to meet them?”
The rep stopped typing, turned to me and templed his hands. “That’s up to you and the student. Think of us as a mutual friend, we just facilitate connections. The way we see it, you two are both adults and both signed up voluntarily, so we leave it up to the two of you to decide how much, if any, contact you would like.”
He went back to typing. “How you get your donations to the student is up to you too. Some donors like to transfer a set amount each month, others ask their recipients to submit a request with a reason and sum, and others just send what they can when they can. Ultimately, the students are happy with whatever they can get. You ever go to college?”
The rep looked at me and waited for me to nod before turning back to the computer and continuing. “So you know how poor most college students are then? Well, the students we help here are too poor to even be one of those poor students. Give them the coins in your glove compartment for all I care. I still get paid.”
The more this guy talked, the less I liked him.
“And that’s about it,” the man’s fingers slowed as he tapped a few final keys. “We’re done here Mr. Lucifer. We’ll send you an email with the details of the student you will be helping. Don’t worry, we don’t send them any of your details, and any emails you two may share are filtered through our encrypted server. You have a great day Damien.”
The man turned back to his computer and typed away, just as he had been before. Exactly as he had been before. I was starting to suspect that he wasn’t actually doing any work on that thing at all but just playing some video game. As shit of a person as he so clearly was, I still sort of envied him. He had it made. Here he was playing video games in plain sight while on the clock, for a job that required no work other than waiting around for people who wanted to give money away walking in, and even if that didn’t happen the Government still paid him anyway. To top all that off, he got to brag to every woman he met that he worked for a charity and helped people for a living. I bet it was all over his social media profiles.
“Can I ask you something else?”
“Huh? You’re still here?” The man looked at me like I was a ghost. “You are the guy I just served, right?”
“Why do I get the student’s details but they don’t get mine?”
The man shrugged and went back to his computer game. “People are more inclined to give their money away when they know it’s not going to a junkie. Supplying our recipient’s details fixes that. It’s a requirement in our terms that recipients need to keep their social medias on public, so donors can keep tabs if they want to.”
This charity was starting to sound like more of a circus, with hoop after hoop that poor students needed to jump through just to survive. But, that said, I was kind of relieved that I could make sure the person I ended giving money to wasn’t going to blow every cent I gave them up their nose.
“Are you leaving this time or do you want to go get me some Cliff Dew?”
I left and hoped I never had to speak to that douche again.
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