The Only Reason I Need

by Crazy Ivan

Some times this job can be a tough one.  The hours can be long (and hot), the venues can be grueling (and hot), the days off can be sparse (and still hot) and the weather can be hot (and humid).  Most of the time it's easy to keep yourself fired up about playing with a toy that you love to pay with, but sometimes you can't help but reflect on how hard a job it can be.

This most often happens 58 days into a 59 day assignment with few days off and a lot of 12 and 13 hour days.  Today, as you might have guessed, was one of those kinds of days.  I've been wearing myself out everyday and the finish line is in sight so it was kind of hard to get fired up today.  I did, but as the sun started to set I really started running out of gas.

And then I talked with one person, it changed the way I looked at my whole day, my whole week, my whole summer and my whole 8 year+ career with Myachi.

Now, first I've got to issue an apology and then lay down a bit of back story.  See, the subject of this story (as I found out tonight) actually reads this blog pretty regularly so I'll feel bad if I embarrass him a bit.  So sorry about that...

Now the back story.  I met this dude about 6 years ago when he was at Dollywood with his nephew.  They got heavily into the game, fell in love with it and bought several.  This, of course, happens to me about a hundred times a day so I filed it somewhere in the banks of happy memories Myachi has provided me and carried on.

I ran into him again the other night and even blogged about it.  He was the collector I talked about in this blog.  He came back today so that we could do a few trades... I dropped the ball and only brought a couple of tradables with me today so we didn't get to do as much trading as I hoped (he did give me a sweet deal on the Straight Jacket I wanted, though).

He showed his collection off to a few of the real maniacs that were hanging out; namely Socks, Triumph and Jumpman (nickname subject to change with or without notice).  We chatted a bit about how he'd built his collection over the years.  Turns out he bought a big chunk of it from a Wolf, a maniac that used to be part of a Myachi Club I hosted early in my Myachi career.

But later that night, right before I left, I also had a chance to speak with his wife.  He's had a series of surgeries on one of his knee and is looking at another in the near future.  He's been largely immobile for much of the time over the past couple of years and I can only imagine how frustrating that must be.  From what his wife told me, Myachi is one of the few things that keeps him excited and having fun.  He can still play, of course, but he also keeps up with us online, collects and trades and enjoys being a part of our small community.

That obviously makes me feel really good about what I do for a living.  But after I left and headed back to the Cabin of Skills, I had a thought that almost overwhelmed me.  It was a complete coincidence that I ran into this guy.  If we hadn't done Dollywood this year or if he'd decided not to come this year, or even come a week or two later, we might never have crossed paths.  I might never have known how meaningful our impact on him really was.

And like I said before, I teach more than a hundred people a day.  I've been doing so for more than eight years.  If the school assemblies and camps where I've taught as many as a thousand people in a day balance out my days off and my significant time at the office I've easily taught over a quarter of a million people in the time I've been with Myachi.

Whose to say how many people I've impacted with this game or how impacted they've been?  Perhaps there are dozens of other heart warming stories about Myachi that I'll never be in the right place to know of.  Perhaps there are other people that were helped through a hard time in their lives by our game.  Perhaps there are other people that have become lifelong fans of the game whose faces I've long forgotten.

I've listed a number of reasons why I love my job on this blog before, but in truth, this is the only reason I really need.