Cheaters Almost Never Win
Written by an anonymous author
This episode was written and sent in by an author who wishes to remain anonymous – partially so the Feds won’t pester him.
Kevin is a perfectly normal freshman at the University of Iowa who discovers an extraordinary workaround, one that will change his life. That same workaround, however, will cause him to disappear from campus altogether.
Published Christmas Day, December 25, 2024
Transcript: Cheaters Almost Never Win
[ Eerie music ]
HOST: Today on campus, it’s 1983. Ronald Reagan is currently in the White House,
Sally Ride just became the first American woman to travel to space. Mario Brothers is about to be released by a little company called Nintendo. And for some reason, people were fanatic about collecting Cabbage Patch Kids, Care Bears, and My Little Ponies. However, none of that matters much to a lazy college student named Kevin.
Kevin is a perfectly normal freshman at the University of Iowa who discovers an extraordinary workaround, one that will change his life. That same workaround, however, will cause him to disappear from campus altogether. Stay tuned for this cautionary tale,
a lesson in life not found in textbooks or online lectures – cheaters almost never win.
[ Marching band music ]
This is Once, In College. I’m Pete Griffith. Today’s episode was written and sent in by an author who wishes to remain anonymous, partially so the Feds won’t pester him. But more on that tidbit later, class is about to begin.
[ Bells from campus tower ]
[ Video game sounds ]
NARRATOR: Let me tell you the very true-ish story about the first roommate I had in college. We will call him Kevin. Kevin was more than a bit pudgy when I first walked in and found him sitting at his desk eating out of a bin of neon-colored cheese balls the first week of our freshman year. He was a bit of a loner who was obsessed with things with small details, like building and painting plastic model kits of airplanes and hotrods. He also enjoyed the effect of smelling the kit’s model glue and the small bins of model paint back when such things weren’t as regulated.
Kevin was more than a little lazy as well. Back home, his mom did his laundry. But mom was not here now at college, and it wasn’t too long before his laundry backed up. Not too long after that, he went from sniffing the pits of his shirts and re-wearing them to cycling through three days of his underwear before swapping them out. At that point, Kevin started to smell. Bad. Really bad. Like from five feet away bad and he started getting bullied for it.
There wasn’t a washer and dryer in the dorm where we lived so I gave Kevin directions to the nearest laundromat. For me it wasn’t too bad of a hike. But for him, especially lugging a bag full of clothes, it might as well have been a trip up Everest without a sherpa.
[ Laundromat sounds ]
What made his first laundry experience worse, and now looking back may have been the start of his entire downfall, was the fact that when he finally made it to the laundromat, the change machine there was broken. And he needed quarters.
Kevin walked across the street to find somewhere to get change. Then down it. Then back down the other side. Then up a block and over a block and by then Kevin was fed up and hangry. There was nothing open that Sunday except a restaurant. So as an impulse buy, Kevin spent most all of the money he had on a nice Italian dinner at a restaurant only parents frequent when they visit their kids on campus. He walked out full but his wallet empty, sans one single dollar bill. Of which he was smart enough to trade that with the waitress for four quarters. Enough for the laundry machine. Until he walked back and found only the pool tables down the street took four quarters. The machines at the laundromat took five.
[ Quarters falling in machine ]
Desperate times call for desperate answers. I’m not sure after living with smelly Kevin at that point who was more desperate, him or me. But Kevin was certainly more resourceful.
The school’s art department at that time had some of the finest digital color scanners ever made. And the printing technology there was so detailed, you could see the details of Kevin’s nose hairs on the copies on the fridge of his face smashed against the glass that he made a copy.
Kevin noticed that coin machines only scan one side of a bill when it sucks it in. And if the bill doesn’t take, it’s usually because it’s too beaten up or the printing is too battered. When that happens, it will spit out what you put in to try again. I never saw the first color copy of a dollar bill he brought back to his desk to meticulously cut out in the exact size of a real one. But the first time Kevin slid it in the laundromat coin machine, it took and four quarters dumped out in the bin below.
[ Quarters falling out ]
As did the second cut-down color copy he put in.
[ Quarters falling out ]
I was so elated that smelly Kevin wasn’t smelly anymore that I never really brought up his laundry situation again. It wasn’t until he was bringing home buckets of cheeseballs and getting the orange dust everywhere when the subject rolled back around. Like any bad criminal, Kevin could not resist telling me of his newly discovered plunder of his pot of gold. The idea of easy money was so intriguing, I went with him the next day without any laundry between us just to watch him do it.
[ Eerie music ]
Most everything I’ve told you to this point is pretty much true but I’m gonna be completely honest with you now. After sweating the pros and cons for three days, I decided to give it a go myself. Late one night, wearing a hoodie over my head and dark sunglasses, even thought it was dark out, I slid my fake dollar look-alike in the slot of the machine and wa-la, four shiny new quarters made their triumphant clang into the bin below. Not gonna lie, it was a wonderous sound.
[ Putting quarters in pocket ]
I scooped them up and scooted out, sweating the entire way home with my adrenaline pumping. I slid under my covers that night thrilled about having gotten away with it. To this day, those four quarters remain both the hardest and easiest dollar I’ve ever made.
At that point, Kevin wasn’t sweating much about it anymore. In fact, he was starting to feed copies of fives and tens into the machine. He would case the laundromat in a series of secret, round-trip missions, measuring out the days and times of day the armored bank vehicles would come to restock when low.
Kevin was able to build up enough quarters over the next few weeks to amass a net worth of $120. Which in today’s dollars, factoring in inflation, is about $470. But when you also factor in being a poor college student eating nothing but ramen noodles each day, that total is really about $1,500. Kevin was flush baby, and his shelf of tiny airplane and hotrod models were proof positive.
When it became too much to stuff in his pockets, he would stash all the quarters he had in the used cardboard model kit boxes. Until their bottoms eventually gave out from the weight. He replaced those by just reaching for the closest thing nearby. A large, plastic cheese puff jar he’d just polished off.
[ Quarters into jar ]
Needless to say, he didn’t notice all the stares at the bank when he poured that jar of quarters, orange dust and all, into the coin machine at the bank to launder, ur, convert the coins into much more manageable paper money.
In fact, he wasn’t noticing much anymore. Like the tiny little camera that someone had now installed above the coin machine at the laundry.
But I noticed it. Thankfully. About a fraction of a millisecond before I was about to slide my second fake into the machine. Which again, thankfully, I did not.
Kevin had gone back home for Spring Break, so I did not see him in time to tell him big brother was now watching. In fact, I never really saw him again. Rumor has it the Feds weren’t going to wait for him to arrive back at campus and showed up one day at his parent’s house asking for him. Nobody knows what happened to Kevin after that. He never came back to college. And I never heard back from him again.
A few days after break when classes started back up, I was called in by the college administration and asked a few questions about Kevin. What type of roommate he was. What type of student? Where he did his laundry? They were soft, easy lobs of questions but I still did my best to sweat through them all. Since they couldn’t pin anything on me, there was nothing they could do with the fact that I was shaking violently as I sat before them. After what seemed like eternity, I was able to leave unscathed and remain in college. But when I asked about Kevin, I was simply told he wasn’t coming back.
[ Video game sounds ]
I had the room to myself for the rest of the semester. A guilty pleasure of sorts. Someone had picked up his clothes and other personal stuff but his models remained on the shelves above his desk.
Every so often, I will dream about Kevin. In my dark scenarios, he’s served his time in jail and is now out and sits across the street from my work at a café, scoping me out on my lunch hour to see when and where it would be safest to confront me.
[ Eerie music ]
On the train ride into work some mornings, when the sun is still low, I also fantasize Kevin was snatched that day at his parent’s house and cut a deal to work for the Feds, infiltrating their systems for weaknesses and helping solve the trickiest counterfeit schemes all the other brilliant minds have been unable to uncover. And when I’m at the grocery store, I still do a doubletake anytime I see a man my age buying cheeseballs wondering if it’s Kevin.
I’ve never really talked about this with anyone, but ever since I walked out of that meeting in the administration office, I embraced two of the other truths about Kevin that are much more realistic. First, he’s probably schlubbing away at some low-level job somewhere that allowed him to be hired as a felon. And two, cheaters never win. At least Kevin didn’t. Someone who knew him, however, still may or may not be up a dollar.
[ Quarters clinking ]
[ Marching band music ]
HOST: Today’s episode was produced by Marie Newman, Rob Wallace and myself, with a special shout out to Michael Henery who contributed some mad sound design and engineering skills.
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If someone in this story sounded like someone you knew once in college, or even yourself, we’d love to hear about it. Ever get away with something on campus that was a tinge illegal? We don’t judge and we’d love to hear about it.
Leave us a comment or two, or visit us at onceincollege.com and connect with us there. We are looking for unique or unusual college experiences like that. Stuff that didn’t happen in class or at a lecture. Which reminds us…
We want to thank this anonymous author again for reminding us that cheaters never win, or rarely do, or at least don’t win too big. And Kevin, if you’re out there listening, we hope we did your story justice.
If you liked any of what you heard today, give us a like. Or share this episode with someone who you may have done something illegal with back in the day. And if you want to hear our upcoming stories the moment they come out, or hear some bonus content that might make you giggle out loud, please subscribe to our podcast. It really helps us more than you’d ever think. More than our GPAs ever did.
Until then, I’m Pete Griffith, back next week with more stories like this, all from a time Once, In College.
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