Okay, this one still blows my mind because its entirely 100% innocent, like finding a needle in a haystack when youre not even looking for the needle.

Like  lei-Lani says we used to help people find money for projects. We would reach out to loan people, venture capitalists, investors, anyone who wanted to throw some money into a project or idea or company we were helping. And for the longest time, we were trying to find some money for this guy in Greece with an aquaculture farm. In case you wonder, aquaculture is a major deal, a lot of money in it if you know what youre doing. Its like the re-creation of fish and seafood by gathering and breeding new young and growing them naturally.

So one day he sends us an email, got this letter from a venture capital company that took an interest in his aquaculture and wanted to put in $5 million into the project to help with tanks, construction, gathering all the fish, etc etc. As loan brokers, we scope these out top to bottom. You don’t trust anything online after all. At least not right away. So I of course get any information I can about the venture company to check before anything else. We do what we call a 50-point inspection, much like youd do a car, only we are testing companies to check validity, phone, address, fax, email, site, background checks, management team anything and everything that tells us the company is either legit or not.

The address comes from London England which of course is gonna be a red flag for me right away, because this has been like "Little Nigeria" for the longest time but there was something about the address that seemed off. It didn’t show up as a business at all, it was a mail-drop off center (like here in America, you can have your mail delivered to an address where you can then come pick up your mail. Lots of businesses use it, not just to keep themselves a bit more private but to have a catch-all mailbox suitable for record-keeping). But someone forgot to cover some tracks because when I googled the catch-all address I found a record which gave a previous address out of a business registry there in London.

So okay I google the previous address and this one checks out as a company. So im starting to think, okay false alarm, maybe everything’s okay……………….until……………

I accessed one other record, Bank of London this time, (i should probably add here, google used to have this amazing "cache" utility where you could look at earlier versions of everything, and that included old docs, like excel sheets, word docs, etc. its still there just harder to use) and this file had a list of addresses that had been blacklisted by the bank… for whatever illegal reason (theft, wire fraud, terrorism, etc)

This address was on the blacklist……………..

Know terrorist organization: Al-Qaeda…………………..

:O

Now… at this time September 11th had happened less than 4 years ago… it was still fresh in our thoughts and burned into our minds. I thought about that day and Lani screaming when the second plane hit live on TV. And something inside me said I should report this…….

I still had the agent’s email address, you know, the SS guy who visited our home for my bush "rant", I sent him an email and several docs to show my work, and he wrote me back to thank me and they would investigate… we didn’t bring up the “Bush” thing of course. :D

I took the civil service exams for the state of Ohio when I was 19. And I passed in the top 2% in the whole state. I had an easy Grade 5 or Grade 6 job for the taking, maybe in the CIA if I wanted to go that route…and that would have been exciting (well to a point, because id probably get fired for blabbing about SOMETHING because i dont keep secrets well (especially like, you know, aliens and things... << >> )) but then I got this job working for a night batch computer operator and that dream went out the door. i turned down the government work because i still hadnt finished college yet and id only be working nights at this other job and could still do college...and my mom was soooooo insistent i finish college. =P

but its funny how it worked out.

Maybe I could’ve been the guy that stopped 9/11……….

or…maybe gotten killed at the Pentagon that day…..

That’s the crazy part about life. We dwell too FUCKING much on the past. we don’t look forward, we look back… and we really need to stop doing it. There can be no what-ifs in our lives, folks… so just stop doing it.

Don’t say “what if” anymore.

Just say “what could be”.