Shameless Fool Tries to Crowdfund a $15,000 Engagement Ring, Receives Only Mockery
(iStockPhoto/nn99)
People can give their money to whomever or whatever they want. If a person wants to give $2 to a potato salad Kickstarter to feel like they’re part of something, well, it’s their $2. But if you put yourself out there and ask for money from strangers, you are opening yourself up for the assessment and judgment of the Internet, and nobody deserves a good public eye-roll like the shameless fool trying to get the Internet to buy him a $15,000 engagement ring.
William Oliver from Atlanta wants to marry his girlfriend, Alexandra. And over the years when people have told him that he “should put a ring on it” or said “love y’all” about them as a couple, Oliver appears to have taken that as a public admission of financial responsibility, because now he’s looking for all those people to come forward and donate to his GoFundMe campaign to raise $15,000 to buy an engagement ring.
Someone needs to go check on Miss Manners. She’s not a young woman, and I’m worried about what this kind of fragrant money-grubbing etiquette breach might do to her.
“I’ve decided to utilize GoFundMe to let everybody who loves us show us,” he wrote. He says that all proceeds will be used to buy an engagement ring that he, his girlfriend, and all their backers can be proud of. (It will belong to Alexandra, though. Backers can be proud of the ring on another woman’s hand.) This is just like the bride who tried to make her bridesmaids buy her a $10,000 wedding dress so that they could all enjoy seeing her look beautiful in her pictures.
Oliver mentions several times in the account that his goal is to get his request trending and to try to go viral. Well, he’s sort of been successful at that. The GoFundMe has been shared more than 14,000 times. Not many of those shares are turnig into dollars though, because so far he’s made $609. Even that seems like a lot.
When asked to defend his GoFundMe, Oliver resorted to a salad of words, which he just flung against the wall hoping some of them would stick:
“Why do couples have to shoulder the cost of the public’s materialistic perception of true love? How much money is too much money when US statistics show that he average American cannot write a $500 check out of their account. Let’s go viral?”
So … he’s trying to condemn the public’s materialistic perception of true love and the state of income inequality in the U.S. by asking strangers to buy him a $15,000 piece of jewelry. Somehow my favorite part is the question mark at the end. “Let’s go viral?” It looks almost sheepish. It should look sheepish, because this is ridiculous.
