The Plagiarist

My name is Michael Bradbury and I am a professional plagiarist.  Do you think I picked a good pseudonym?  I really hope I did.  I’d hate to have an un-plagiarist sounding name, you know?  Hmm…  No, I suppose you don’t.  But I thought I’d share my short yet somewhat successful career.  I don’t know if you would like to refer to it as a career, but it brought in money and when you’ve lived as little as I have, you start to realize that money is all that matters.  Once middle age hits, a person really starts to go heavy on the “there’s more to life than money” shtick.  Then that person will go on about how having a loving family is really being rich.  I beg to differ.  I’ve always had a loving family and I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anything more than as much as I want money.  Damn do I need it!  Well, not so much any more.  But damn did I need it!

It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, I began my first successful money making scheme.  You with me so far?  Good.  I’d hate to loose anybody.

I was sitting in English class (yes, that’s opposed to standing) working on an English paper (opposed to a Spanish paper which would make no sense at all, but I thought I should clear that up) and the idea slapped me across the face.  It slapped me so hard that I fell out of my chair and stood up to notice the entire class laughing at me.  Now that I think about it, I doubt I was ever working.  I was probably daydreaming.  The point is that the idea that bitch slapped me to the floor was one of brilliance and to not employ such genius would be a sin.

The idea was obviously to start up a business of writing other people’s papers for them.  This idea eventually evolved into one that consisted of making money through professional plagiarism, but I assure you that during this whole process of contemplation my heart was in the right place, which is really weird because I always thought my heart was supposed to be on my left.  I shrugged it off anyway, and got to work.

It was a hard day’s night and I was working like a dog, but I finally found a way to make my plot work.  It was quite simple, really.  I would simply find little known pieces of work, via the Internet, and sell them at school.  Brilliant, no?  You’re right, it’s not, and that’s why it’s so great!  I was able to make money with very little thinking involved.  Some people would choose to see that as a bad thing, but me…  Yeah, okay, in the long run it’s really not too beneficial, but hey, it was fun.

There were rules to my operation, though.  Actually, there was really on one main rule.  I promised myself not to sell to anyone with the same teacher as I.  That wouldn’t be a wise move.  Instead I sold papers to English students in lower and higher classes than I.  I would tell them that I wrote the damn thing, and then they would turn around and write their own name on the paper.  So in a sense I wasn’t the only plagiarist involved with this.  But I was reaping all the benefits, and by benefits I mean money.

My original main source of swindled works was free essay sites.  I love those places.  Nobody cares if something is stolen from there.  My professional plagiarism skills were also greatly advantageous for me.  And as time went on I gradually got more and more daring.

One week I was given a Spanish assignment to write part of a story in a few pages.  Well that ended up being one of the easier assignments of my life.  I owe many thanks to Cervantes.  Now, I don’t want to encourage the insulting of educators.  In fact, I’m a big pro-learning type of guy, but I mean come on!  It was Cervantes for Christ’s sake.  That is not my greatest success story, however.  Few match up to the story I’m about to tell you.

It was very late one night, which was the complete opposite of it being a little early one morning, and I had a very important science paper due the next day.  I think it was on gravity or some such thing.  It must have had to have something to due with relativity because I clearly remember looking up Einstein’s theory of relativity and copying and pasting a nice sizable portion of it.  I printed out that portion and impressed my physics teacher half to death.  I got the highest grade I have ever gotten on any written piece of shit that I’ve ever jacked from the web.  I couldn’t believe it worked.  I nearly…  I don’t think I nearly did anything.  I was too shocked.

Many people around campus liked to listen to my tall-tales…  That’s kind of an understatement, really.  The tales weren’t really as much tall-tales as they were astonishingly obese lies.  At any rate, I liked to tell stories about all the Pulitzers won and such.  I even brought in pictures of my Nobel Prize.  That was another fine piece jacked from the Internet.  I’ll tell you, there is nothing that can’t be had from the Internet. 

The moral of the story is that if you can’t hoodwink someone into thinking you’re something you’re not through pure acting skills, maybe you should try the Internet.  My parents told me I could be anything I wanted as long as I put my mind to it.  They were damn well right.  I didn’t even have to use my own mind.  I became what I wanted to by using the minds of others!