Fake Oatmeal

If you’ve been following the story of The Oatmeal’s problems with their former lawyer Charles Carreon, you are either a huge fan of The Oatmeal, a huge fan of lawyers, or spend too much money online.  As a part of this ongoing argument, the creator of The Oatmeal, Matthew Inman, promised to take a picture of himself with the money he raised for charity if in fact he reached the goal he intended to reach.  On Monday, July 09, 2012, Mr. Inman followed through on that promise.

These are pictures posted on The Oatmeal’s website.  These are pictures of a lot of money.  In response to a number of comments about these pictures, Matthew Inman, under the profile theoatmeal, posted this:

theoatmeal

I'm seeing a lot of the same questions, so Ill do my best to answer them here.

Coins:
As you can see, there's more than 4 cents on the floor in the giant FU picture.  I mistakenly thought it was 54 cents, so the actual amount pictured is $211,233.54 instead of $211,233.04. 

Transporting the money:
I had to order the money from Bank of America about a week ahead of time and then go pick it up at a local branch.  I didn't want to take the photo of the money while inside the bank because they only had a tiny room and I felt a bit more secure taking it offsite to somewhere private.  One of my oldest friends happens to be tall, scary, heavily bearded, and have a large selection of (licensed) firearms.  I asked him to come with me and play bodyguard.  We took the money to my office and shot pictures of the photos on the floor.  It took about two hours and we returned it to the bank, where they machine-counted all the bills.   The whole experience was basically like the movie "Bodyguard" except Whitney Houston had a beard and guns and no one got naked with Kevin Costner.

The size
$211k in cash actually wasn't that impressive to look at, even in $20 bills.  I expected this huge crate of money.  It was really heavy though, despite being not as gimungus as I'd imagined.  

Rolling in it
I wanted to take a funny photo of me rolling in it, but the act of bathing in money sounded funny in theory but actually doing it felt really braggadocio, so I tried to just keep it classy and post photos of the money arranged in various shapes.

The drawing
I got a little frame for the drawing of FunnyJunk's mother and I'm hoping Carreon will pass it on to him.  

That's it for now! 

-The Oatmeal

This, as well as not disclosing that it is so, gives the impression that these pictures are real, that these pictures are of the real money that was raised.  I believe that this is not the case.  I believe that these pictures were not of real money.

The reasons for this are many.  First of all, even if you order it, there is no way that a bank would have $200,000 worth of physical currency in it.  It is simply not practical.  If a bank robber happened to hit that bank when it happened to have that amount of money in it, the robbers would make out like bandits.  Even if the individual branch it worth in excess of $200,000, there is no way that they would hold that kind of currency in the bank itself.  We learned that from It’s A Wonderful Life.

Besides that, even if you could get that kind of money together, there are much more practical ways to stage a photo shoot with a large sum of money.  Here is how.

The first thing you need, and probably the hardest thing to get a hold of, is the money.  Now, you could go down to Kinko’s and get a vast quantity of blank pieces of green paper for your shoot.  However, the shade of green necessary for the photo shoot may not be available at your local Kinko’s.  Also, Kinko’s no longer exists.  What you need is the kind of money that they use for movie and television shows.  Prop money.  Where can you get that?  eBay.

Prop money is for sale on eBay.  You can buy bundles of $20 bills, in $2000 quantities with the bands intact, for $29.77 a piece.  For the proposed photo shoot, you would need $200,000 worth, or one hundred bundles.  With free shipping, total cost: $297.70

The second thing you need is the gym bag.  Gym bags can be bought in many places.  Amazon.c om sells them for between $20 and $40.

Here is a blue one, similar to the one in the first picture.  With free shipping, cost $25.95.  Total cost so far: $323.65

The third thing you need is the space you intend to shoot at.  All this requires is an apartment, much like the one you may already live in, with a clean carpet or floor, much like the one you may already have, with no furniture, which only requires that you have a couple of guys to help you move things temporarily.  Having a couple of guys over to your place to help move things may require you to compensate them, preferable with beer.  The cost of beer varies from state to state, and may vary depending on how much beer you buy and how many guys you use.  Let’s high ball it, $100.  Total cost so far: $423.65

$423.65.  That’s how much it would have costs to stage this shoot.  $423.65.  I got paid last Friday.  You know how much I put toward paying off debt?  $500.84.  I could have paid to arrange this photo shoot.  In fact, I would, but getting into a new home is more important to me than staging a photo shoot.

This is why I believe The Oatmeal’s photo shoot was staged.  You may disagree with me, but think about this: Which is more likely, the $200,000 option or the $423.65 option?