El Cheapo

El Cheapo was the best thing that happened to me in middle school. If you don’t know what El Cheapo is, it’s a company that provides the most exorbitant products at the most exorbitant prices. El Cheapo does all of its own advertising, and it has many different branches that provide for every needless need.

Examples of their products include the El Cheapo Ec Cube, El Cheapo Beat Stix, and the El Cheapo Doors OS.

We made our own ads. We thought of the most useless products, like a solar powered electric blanket, and spent homeroom drawing and writing our ad on a piece of lined paper. Sometimes we even made them during real class. This was how I met Ishmam and Jeff. Most of my time in 8^th grade was spent doing El Cheapo related shenanigans.

We showed the ads to our other friends, and they got a kick out of it. At first that was enough, but we wanted more lulz. We started hanging them up outside on lockers. We hung them on our own lockers, and we asked permission from other kids to put them on their lockers. It was great at first.

Then all of a sudden they were getting torn down. Without mercy, and with scraps still on lockers, the ads disappeared soon after we hung them up. It wasn’t the teachers or the janitors that were tearing them down. It was other kids. Other kids who thought we were posting the ads randomly and vandalizing other kids’ lockers. We were most definitely not. We asked everyone if we could use their locker beforehand. These misinformed vigilantes were obstinate. They listened to no one—and they never got the jokes.

That didn’t stop us, though. We became—if the word had existed back then—cheppier. There were even more bizarre creations, and they went under the El Chep branch of El Cheapo. Soon we left El Cheapo behind, because El Chep grew bigger. So big, that a new word had spawned out of our mischief: “chep.”

Chep can be a noun or an adjective.

Something can be “pure chep,” or “full of chep.”

Something can be “cheppy,” “the cheppiest,” or “cheppier.”

Chep means something is poorly created, but with humor in mind.

On a rough comparison, “cheppy” and “shoddy” are similar, but something “cheppy” is also hilariously stupid.

We didn’t realize at the time that we were manufacturing vernacular, and I think that’s important to how “chep” stuck around.

Frindle is an act of rebellion, and an act of replacement.

We at El Cheapo filled a hole in the vocabulary of the people. We created a new word that others started using without our direct encouragement. It was a need we did not realize we needed filled, but there it was, full of chep.

The last time I was involved with making El Cheapo products was in 9^th grade, but El Cheapo lives on in all of us.

Friendship, Chep, Freedom

Ian