How my college friends and I turned Beer Night into the TNC – the Thursday Night Consortium (P)

Preface: The Itch

Every fall, when the student loan money comes in, I get the urge to play in the stock market. And this October I scratched that itch. Sure, I might loose the money, but honestly – we’re talking coffee and cig money here. It may actually be healthy for me to lose the dough and ditch these habits.

“Joseph, it’s borrowed money,” became my partner’s refrain after I mentioned this to him. That’s not quite true though: the loan money went to the school and living expenses. The meager stipend I get from the college paper and the occasional freelancing checks are what get funneled into this game.

Did you catch the usage of the word game? Game, experiment, hobby – that’s all this is. Sure, I want to make a buck but I’m not holding my breath. Ultimately, I just want to have fun as a small fry in the turbulent oceans of exchange.

Somehow, due to a stock tip dropped during on a drunken Thursday night (the regular bar night for a bunch of us English majors), my little game grew and the TNC was born.

Our goal? To change the world with the very tools that have made it such a hard place for so many people. To be young college students who realize we have the power to bring a social conscience to Mega-Corp America, that we can take control through the markets that are the very blood of these companies and encourage life and environment saving technologies to be shared globally. And if we can’t, as share holders we run the company into the ground.

Sure, we want to make a buck but we know we won’t get rich doing this (our constitution actually insists the TNC never becomes our primary source of income).

To be continued…