It Started with a Paperclip

 

I like to trade.  Bartering harkens back to the days before money, or at least times when paper money wasn’t the all-encompassing measure of value that it is today.

Of course, I’ve traded days-off and hours-on with my coworkers when one or, preferably, both of us could benefit from such a swap.  That’s the best kind of trade, isn’t it?  You know, the ones when both parties walk away feeling like they got a good deal.

I’ve traded skills and time and livestock and junk and all kinds of stuff.

But never have I pulled-off a trade like Kyle MacDonald did.

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Kyle was sitting around one day thinking.  I suppose he was fiddling with a red paperclip at work and it occurred to him that people use paperclips all the time and don’t value them much at all.  How many of us have removed a paperclip from a bundle of papers and absentmindedly stuck it in a paperclip holder, or tossed it in a drawer or even the trash?

Yeah, me too.

Now, I thought I was a big thinker but it seems that Kyle thinks much bigger than even I do.  You won’t believe what his ultimate outcome was.

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He posted a picture of the red paperclip on Craigslist and said he’d like to trade it for…something.

It wasn’t too long before two girls named Ronnie and Carina contacted him and said, “Hey, that’s pretty cool.  We’d like to trade with you.  We’ve got a pen shaped like a fish.”

Now I’ve found myself needing a paperclip but I’ve never needed a pen shaped like a fish, but Kyle saw it as a trade-upk so he made the swap with the two girls, and immediately posted on Craigslist again.  “Anybody want a pen shaped like a fish?”

A lady named Annie (No, not MY Annie.) said, “I’ve got a doorknob with a crazy face on it.”

MacDonald thought, “This is crazy.  How far can I go with this?”

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His next listing prompted a man named Shawn to call him and say, “Come down to my place.  I’ll cook you burgers and I’ll trade you my camp stove for that hand-sculpted doorknob because I need it to fix the knob on my stovetop espresso maker.”

Now this was the old-style Coleman camp stove.  You know, you fill the tank with white gas and pump up the pressure, then cook on one of the two burners.  That was quite an increase in value for Kyle.

Sgt. David Jay of the U.S. Marines just happened to be looking for that exact model of camping stove.  I kid you not.

He said, “Would you like an electric generator?”

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Now since Kyle was a kid he’d always wanted to be able to produce his own electricity and the Honda generator should achieve that dream.  The swap was made.

Well, the generator wasn’t as hot on Craigslist as Kyle thought it would be, so it took him several weeks of advertising before he was contacted by Martin, who said, “Look, I’ve got an empty beer keg.  I’ll trade you an IOU to fill the keg with beer, and a Budweiser sign.  Whattayasay?”

He agreed to the deal.

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Kyle must have a bit of marketing wizard in him because he advertised his new beer keg/IOU/neon Budweiser sign as an “Instant Party”.  He added, “Does anybody out there want to party?”

A comedian and radio personality in Quebec named Michel Barrette said, “I want to make a trade.  I’ll trade you my worst snowmobile.”

MacDonald was intrigued.  I guess he didn’t realize how popular snowmobiles are in Canada because Barrette’s “worst snowmobile” was actually a pretty nice Ski-Doo.

Kyle got a pretty quick education in Canadians and snowmobiles because it was winter which is, obviously, prime time for Ski-Doo sales.

Snow Riders West, a magazine geared toward snowmobile enthusiasts (I didn’t really have to tell you that, did I?) contacted Kyle with an offer of a two person trip to Yahk, British Columbia, in the Canadian Rockies in trade for the Ski-Doo.  Folks at the magazine thought it would give them some publicity and, well, everybody wants to go to the Canadian Rockies in the winter, right?

I know I do.

The catch was that Kyle had to get to Yahk.

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Now it just so happens that MacDonald had been wearing a shirt from the uniform company Cintas when he did an interview on national television.  It had a patch with the company logo on the pocket.  A high ranking officer of Cintas saw Kyle on TV with the shirt on and contacted him.  He offered to trade one of their cargo trucks, with the logo on it, for the second-person trip to the Rockies.  Kyle drove the truck while the corporate honcho flew because, well, that was part of the trip.

But what could MacDonald swap the truck for?

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At one point, Kyle had been offered a recording contract with Metalworks in Mississauga, Ontario by a man named Brenden whose band needed something bigger than Brenden’s 1988 Volkswagen Jetta.

“Who wants to be a recording artist?” was Kyle’s next ad.

You know that got some attention…and a lot of responses.

He was offered one person’s soul.  Really.  Well the person was a soul singer so, maybe…?

Another person actually wanted to swap a pinky finger!  I guess it could have been a worse finger.

Propriety forbids me from saying what one young lady offered him, but he turned it down.  For one thing, he wasn’t sure what the legal ramifications would be.  I think his girlfriend may have had something to do with the decision too.

Then a lady named Jody Gnant said, “Look, I’ve got a half a duplex in Phoenix Arizona.  I’ll trade you a year of free rent in my duplex.”

When Jody’s next door neighbor, Lesli, found out about the swap, she said she wanted the year of free rent and offered to trade an afternoon with her boss.

Yeah, right.

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Lesli said she’d bring her boss out to meet MacDonald and came out the door holding a head.

Yes, a head.

It was a bust of a famous rock star.  It turns out her boss is Alice Cooper.

Yes, THE Alice Cooper.  We’re talking rock-n-roll royalty here.

Lesli manages a restaurant in Phoenix owned by Cooper.

Mr. Cooper’s tour manager called to say, “We’re on tour in Fargo, North Dakota.  Why don’t you come up, experience an afternoon with Alice Cooper, and see what it’s like?”

Yeah, buddy!

Not only did Kyle make the trip to Fargo and spend an afternoon with the Prince of Darkness, but Cooper called him out on stage where the two of them held up a giant, red paperclip!

I’m pretty sure the clip wasn’t real but can you imagine the pile of papers a ten foot long paperclip would hold together?

Later, Cooper made one request of Kyle, “Can you promise you won’t trade an afternoon with me for a weekend with the Rolling Stones, or a night with KISS?”

Kyle agreed to try.

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When his phone rang, Kyle picked it up to be greeted by Mark, who is a photographer and a big fan of Alice Cooper.  He also has a lot of KISS memorabilia.  Just don’t tell Mr. Cooper.

Mark asked, “How about a KISS snow globe?”

Yes, a regular size snow globe of KISS.  When I heard that I had to question Kyle’s values, but he agreed and the two met up to make the exchange.

Evidently a lot of people on the internet think the same way I do, judging from all the messages he got telling him exactly how dumb that swap was.  I think the general feeling was summed up by the one signed, “Anonymous.”

It said, “This is possibly the dumbest decision I have ever seen anyone make…ever…except for the people on Jerry Springer.  They make stupid decisions all the time.”

That’s pretty dumb.

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Well, Kyle was ahead of the rest of us.  A couple months before this trade, he had gotten a phone call from the actor, Corbin Bernsen, who said, “I’m making a movie (Donna on Demand) and I’d like to offer a paid, speaking, credited role in a Hollywood film.  Would you be interested in trading for that?”

Kyle is young enough that he didn’t exactly know who Corbin Bernsen is, so he looked him up on Wikipedia.  Besides his acting credits, he found that Bernsen holds a record for possessing the world’s largest collection of, you guessed it, snow globes (over 6,500 of the glass spheres).

Well, guess who not only wanted the KISS snow globe, but said, “I NEED it!”

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Then another Canadian came into the picture.  The Economic Development Officer for Kipling, Saskatchewan, Burt Rhodes, called to say, “We see that you’ve been doing this project.  Would there be the potential that maybe we could trade one of (our) houses?  We’ll have a huge housewarming and invite everybody in the world to come to Kipling.  We can have live auditions for the movie role here.”

The only catch was that Rhodes had to get permission from the town council…both members.  They agreed.

The housewarming was huge for Kipling, a town with a population of less than 1000 residents.  More than 3,500 people showed up for that weekend.

Between 500 and 600 people tried out in the live auditions, which were held in a building with a capacity of only 300.  The volunteer fire department let the fire code violations slide since, well, they tried out too.

The next day Mr. Bernson announced Nolan Hubbard as the winner of the movie role.

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Among the people in the crowd at Kipling was Carina, one of the two girls from the original trade.  Around her neck she wore the red paperclip that started the whole thing.

People thought about how much the clip must be worth and actually asked MacDonald, “Wow, you traded away that paperclip.  Don’t you wish you had it back now?”

Kyle replied, “It wasn’t about the paperclip.  It’s not about having it, or selling it for what it’s worth.  If I hadn’t traded away that red paperclip, I’d just be a guy, sitting there at his desk, holding a paperclip in his hand, wondering, ‘What would happen if I did something with a paperclip?’  So, if you have a paperclip, trade it away.  You might only get a fish pen, but it might be the single step that leads to an amazing journey.”

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So, to Kyle MacDonald, I say, “Dude, you traded a red paperclip for a house!”

I don’t know about you, my readers, but I’ve got a couple boxes of paperclips I’ve had for years, in a drawer of my desk.

I could be sitting on a gold mine!

 

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(above) Yes, this is the red paperclip in the post.