There have been 3 times in my life that finding money was memorable…I’ve found a bill floating here and there, and basically my rule with cash is, I see someone drop it, I give it to them, I see a person looking around for someone and I see money, I figure that’s what they’re looking for…and if the money has some way of being identified, I do what it takes. But if I find money, no one seems to be looking for it, there’s no apparent owner and there’s no way to really ensure that the right person will get it, I’ll keep it…I figure you win some, you lose some in life, you try to do the right thing, but don’t just lie down and take it every time you lose some, and then give up your good fortune every time you win some, it’s a balance issue for me. Now, lets say I see money on the ground, if it’s a $5 or less, I’ll probably just look to see if anyone is obviously looking for it, but you’re in line at the checkout at a grocery store, you figure someone probably put their change back in a hurry and is long gone…now if it was the person in front of me who dropped it, chances are I’ll have seen them drop it and say something, but let’s say it’s clear they didn’t drop it, they just didn’t notice it, and I have no idea what the person in front of them, who is probably already in his/her car halfway home looks like, sure, I’ll pocket it. Now if it’s more than a few bucks, maybe I hang around a bit after I pick it up to see if anyone comes back. But eventually if it’s not clear, I have to trust the powers that be wherever I might turn something like this in, and rarely is that the case.
The first time I found money, I was maybe 12, it was the early 1980s and people still used payphones, and I always checked the coin slot for change. Usually nothing, every now and then I’d come across a dime or even a quarter, but one time I found over $4 in change in the coin return. I figured someone must have made an expensive long distance call, put in a bunch of money then left and didn’t realize they had change coming back. Even then I waited by the phone to see if anyone came back to claim it before I walked away with it, but it’s really unlikely after 5 minutes that someone is going to come back for that change, not worth the hassle of trying to turn it in.
The first time I found a significant amount of money was when I found a check made from one party to another for $98. The thing about this check is it was endorsed, which made it basically a bearer instrument, meaning I could have just cashed it. Now to me that would have been active fraud, and there was an address for the person who wrote the check. I had to look up their info by calling information, and I called them, and they wouldn’t put me in touch with the person they’d written the check to…they took MY information, called that person and had THAT person call ME. I got the address for that person, mailed the check to them at my expense, and never got as much as a thank you. I invested probably half an hour of my time trying to do the right thing, and I did.
Next time however it was cash. I was at a Menards, my wife was looking at something and I was bored, so to kill a couple minutes, I walked into this little pre-fab sauna they had for sale. In this little wooden room, behind where I was sitting was this little slide door, it was about 2 inches high by 4 inches wide, you pulled a handle and a little door slid to the right. It was probably designed to let a hose through so you could spray down the hot rocks. Anyway, stuffed inside was $147 in cash. I went to my wife and told her what had happened and asked her what she would do. Now she is the most honest person I’ve never met, she lives by a code of it it’s not mine, it’s not mine. But she told me first to think about how it got there. Either a) someone was leaving it there and some drug dealer was going to take it and leave something in it’s place, or b) more likely, some employee swiped it from the cash register and didn’t want to get caught with it on his person, so he put it there and figured he’d come back for it later. And she’s worked retail, she told me to think aobut how much they pay their managers here (or actually how little they pay them). You find someone at customer service or a store manager and turn that money in, it is NOT going to find its rightful owner. Cynical though that may be, my options were to keep it or call the cops, as turning it in would just mean someone else gets it and not me. And calling the cops, my experience with cops in this city has been that they’re fairly ineffectual, they pretty much only even try to recover stolen property if it has a serial number (I’ve had a number of things stolen…I just had someone force their way into my garage and steal my wife’s bike, they don’t even come out to file a report, they just do it over the phone and unless you had a serial # for the bike, they pretty much report it and move on…I had someone break into an apartment many years ago, I asked them if they took fingerprints and their answer is, “I’m not Quincy”.) So, the cops don’t give a shit, the money was almost 100% certainly from someone up to no good who deserved to get fucked over, and there was no way in hell it was going to go to the righful owner or anyone more deserving than me. So, we kept it and spent it, and just like the time I went to great lengths to get the money back to the rightful owner, I have no qualms about what I did there.
