If you found a bill laying around

[Striker]

The other day, I went to the bank to deposit my check and to take out some cash so I could live for the next 2 weeks. When I went to fill out the deposit slip, I found a dollar bill lying on the counter, all crumpled up. I looked around to see if someone left it by accident, but there was no one close to where I was. I thought about it for awhile, and I decided to take it to the teller and give it back.

When I got to the window, I handed him the bill and said I found it over by the slips. He looked at it (and me) strangely and asked if anyone was around to claim it. I mentioned that no one was around and I felt it would be better to turn it in, just in case someone came asking for it.

Well, the teller kind of shrugged his shoulders as he was working on my transaction, and then said that I should just take the money. "It's only a dollar. It's not like your stealing thousands from us." Well, I pushed it back and I told him that I wouldn't feel right taking it. Maybe it was a kid's dollar bill and maybe they'll come back for it.

The teller took it, shrugged his shoulders again, gave me this unsure look, and finished the deposit. As he handed me my money that I took out of my account, he said that I was probably the most honest person he had ever met. I didn't know what to say, so I said thanks and went on my way.

I'm still flabbergasted that he said that. So my question to you is, what would you have done in my place? Kind of a twist to the "What would you do if you found $1million?" since a dollar isn't as noticable if it was missing.

[Artega]

I'm Lawful Good in just about everything I do, but I have a very Lawful Neutral way of looking at things. I see things as completely black or completely white; there is no grey in my eyes. So, either you do something, or you don't do it - there's no such thing as trying in my book. As such, I would view taking the dollar as the Evil thing to do, while attempting to return it would be the Good thing, so it's an obvious choice to me. It may seem like I'm obsessed with the Alignment system from AD&D, but when you think about it, it really does do a fairly good job of classifying people and events in real life. I've found that by simply watching people, you can get to a point where they fall into one of the nine Alignments. Most people I've watched around my home and at my school seem to be either Chaotic Good or Chaotic Evil. Or maybe I'm just an insane AD&D-obsessed gamer. O_O

At any rate, I'd return the dollar.

[Chaerophon]

You won't keep a one dollar bill? Wow. I doubt if anyone's going to run all over town looking for a dollar.

[Chaerophon]

there is no grey in my eyes.

Well, most people would argue that that's not a very productive or realistic world view to have. In fact, I'd go out on a limb and say that you're deluding yourself if that's what you think you really feel. You've never felt sympathy for a villain? (Try Edmund in King Lear) ( OOOH, even better, Brutus in Julius Caesar!)

I would view taking the dollar as the Evil thing to do

Nope. FAR from evil. Maybe not as honest as possible, but definitely not evil or even bad. "Hey, look, a dollar!" If you heard a little kid say that and he picked it up to buy some candy, you'd think that he had just committed an evil act? I don't think so. It's an everyday occurence, not some sort of telling moral dillemma. Now, 100 bucks? That's more of an issue. STILL not evil though. Just a little bit bad - on the other hand, maybe he's going to donate it to charity... Then is it good or bad, black or white? Very gray, albeit, a light gray.

it really does do a fairly good job of classifying people and events in real life.

Nope, I don't think so. People and life are far more complicated than that.

Or maybe I'm just an insane AD&D-obsessed gamer.

Well....

Edit: I pray to God nobody corrects me on the spelling of 'gray' :P

[Nicodemus Phaulkon]

Take the dollar.

Walk to the news stand/local mom and pop's/convenience store and buy today's newspaper (hopefully a decent one).

Walk into the local hospital/doctor's clinic and leave the paper in the waiting area.

Now the dollar becomes education, literacy, social responsibility, economic reporting, humour, satire, sadness and hope.

Fit that one into your Black and White existence, Artega. B)

*tips helm*

[--Pete]

Hi,

How about a dime? A penny? I think that we've got ourselves the inverse of the joke, "We've already determined that. Now we're haggling over the price."

I hope for your sake that you are really young.

--Pete

PS Of course I voted to take the dollar.

[Isolde]

How about option 3? Leave the dollar where it is.

Oh, also, if it's coinage and it's on the ground, I'd take it. If it's a bundle of wet dollar bills I find in a storm drain while running, I take it too.

And I would consider the person who actively went to look for and return the money to its' rightful owner to be more moral than me in this regard.

[Roland]

Odd.

[Roland]

...do the ends justify the means?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. In the end, it's all personal perspective.

Me, I'd turn the dollar in. Or, at least leave it there.

Now, if it was on the ground, that's another story. I wouldn't just leave it lying. ;) Find the owner, if I could. If I couldn't, I'd give it a good home.

[Taem]

Depends of the circumstances, but most likly I'd:

Keep it (see reason below)

In my line of work as a waiter and part-time manager of a restaurant, I see a lot of lost tips and to-go tips that no body claims. I don't "keep it", but there is no place to put it, so I put it in the register. Hopefully we will be 'over' at the end of the night, or at least even. So I voted to "keep it", even though I'm not actually keeping it.

[Elric of Grans]

Hail Striker,

It would depend on if I thought there were any chance of finding the owner or not. I've had two situations in the past. Once, when I was walking along a back roack, I found a $50 note on the grass. I was in the middle of nowhere, no one was anywhere to be seen, so I kept it. After all, there is no way anyone would ever be able to identify who it belonged to.

Another time, in a similar situation, I found money, cards, and all kinds of other things, all spread around a back road. Looked like someone had tipped the contents of their wallet everywhere. As I was able to identify who it all belonged to (good old Library Card, along with the Yellow Pages, helped there), I returned every last item to them. They think they must have left their wallet on top of the car as they strapped their kid in: car picks up pace, everything goes flying!

In your place? Wouldn't know. Probably would have left it as Isolde suggested. We don't have $1 notes any more either, so it's harder to picture. To your extreme though, if I found $1,000,000, then I would have handed it in: no question!

On an interesting point, they did a test on this in several places around the world. In Australia, they left 100 wallets in Melboure, each with $100 in them. About 30 wallets were taken to the Police, with the $100, and about 20 empty wallets were handed in. On the other hand, they did the exact same thing in Saudi Arabia: apparently after a week, they had to go back and get their own wallets, as no one dared to touch them. Makes you think about a lot of things on several different levels, eh?

[Vandiablo]

he said that I was probably the most honest person he had ever met

Just keep in mind that there's a high turnover rate for bank tellers. His sample size might not have been very large.

Anyway, that has happened to me.. only it was a $10 bill.

I have, several times, returned money to a cashier because I received too much change. I've seen people unknowingly drop money and I point it out to them rather than wait for them to leave. I have benefitted from calculation errors in contests that put me at the top and would have gotten me a trophy, but both times I informed the organizers of their mistakes. (One of those times they still gave me a trophy at a ceremony and then said I didn't deserve it, how's that to treat someone who pointed out the mistake? I had tried to not get it at all and they made me out like a cheato chump grrr... lesson learned, if you know you don't deserve it, don't let them put it in your hands)

BUT...

the day I found the $10 bill I just SWOOP it's gone. Here are the particulars: I was in my high school gym class and it was in a small gym. In the seconds after I picked up the bill and kept it in my fist (I had no pockets) I figured it probably belonged to the gym teacher, who was a (parent-mating orifice) whom I loathed. It was an easy decision. I guess I also considered the possibility that it belonged to one of the other kids but I figured half the kids would claim they lost it. Years later, I figure that it had to be one of the kids, and they didn't feel safe leaving it in their locker. Somebody probably went hungry that day.

Karma caught up with me... one day a few years later, I was putting money in a machine that dispensed commuting train tickets. It ate $10 of mine. I figured the station guy would never believe "hey i put ten bucks in there and now it's GONE" so I just took the loss.

What would I do NOW, as a fully-grown adult, finding cash? If it's a small amount, and if it's not returnable, meaning theres no way to ever find the owner, I'll pick it up and, yep, keep it. Why? Because it was mine, that's why. Heh. What I mean is, I often just cram bills into my pocket without putting them into my wallet, and sometimes I will pull out my wallet later in the day and most of the crammed bills fall to the floor. You'd think that you'd notice that, but sometimes I've only noticed it because the money made a noise when it hit the floor. I figure there's probably been a few times where I've provided that money that someone found. One time my wallet fell out of my back pocket (very raggedy jeans) and I would not have noticed except for the small yet distinctive plop. I had kept on walking but I felt my pocket-- empty. I turned around, yep, there it was on the floor of the front of the supermarket. There was this kid about 8 years old whose eyes were real big -- it was obvious he was seeing money fall from the sky. If I'd taken two more seconds or if the kid had been a little faster I would have had to go get a new driver's license.

I was a cashier one summer, once, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth. (Dinosaur cars, that is.) One time someone gave me a single bill for a $6 charge. I took the bill and put it in the appropriate cash slot. If any of you were cashiers before everything became automated you know what happened next. Had I just put away a ten or a twenty? I couldn't remember. I had just put the bill somewhere but I didn't remember which slot. If you've never been a cashier you think that people can't possibly forget that quickly, but if you're doing transaction after xaction after xaction, your mind can suddenly confuse the current transaction with the last hundred that you've done. So what did I do? I handed them four bucks and from their immediate look of several emotions I knew that they deserved ten more which I got out of the drawer as fast as I could. I told them the truth, that I had forgotten, but they gave me a nasty "yeah, right" before leaving in a huff (as I would have done in their shoes.) So that's why cashiers usually don't put away the bill you give them until after you get your change. I saw someone else have the exact same memory lapse years later-- I was overseeing a cashier who suddenly froze -- fort'ly for him i was there to say "you owe this person (x) dollars change". After the customer left, the cashier told me "yeah i suddenly couldn't remember how much they given me and I had put it away"... yep, been there, done that.

Last item... shoot I forgot what it was... durn memory lapses.

Oh well I can't remember it, but I just remembered another thing -- when I was 6 or 7 I found a diamond outdoors. I turned it in, but being so young, turning it in meant giving it to my grandmother. I have no idea what happened to it, tho my gram was/is a saint. It was probably fake, but to a kid the possibility that it was a real diamond was very high.

Oh ya! now i member... that same cashier job... they had a really cheapo cash box. We were instructed when we got twenties or a lot of tens to stuff them in a drawer under the counter. (Really hidden, eh?) Most nights my end-of-the-night tally was dead-on, but one night I was ten bucks short. (Again with the ten bucks!) I took pride in being dead-on and I had no idea how I could be that far off. Back then, it would take me four hours of work to earn ten bucks (not that I'm that old, but they were that cheap). The manager suggested I go back to the drawer and check it. Yep, there was a ten that had slid all the way to the back of the long drawer. My manager seemed sincere about believing I had missed the ten when I packed up, and so I didn't think anything about it. However, the next time the supervisor showed up, he came to me and told me if that happened again I was outta there. I was flabbergasted. How could he think I did that deliberately? What an orifice. The room with the drawer had been locked up, I should have had the manager come there with me to find the bill. The super must have thought I pulled it out of my pocket and said it came from the drawer. The fact was, I did not have access to that bill and if the mgr and I had found it together, there would have been a whole lot less suspicion of me. But I was naive, not only because I was naive in general, but I knew the truth and I had expected people to believe me.

Wow. This is cheaper than therapy.

[Whiggles]

If I found some cash (however much), I would most certainly keep it. My line of thinking is that if I didn't take it, someone else would. The thing is, if you find a bill in the street, there's not really anywhere you can take it. In a bank, it's a different story I suppose, since they deal in money and could keep it safe in case someone came in asking for it, but I think the Chaotic side of me would probably still take it.

To tell you the truth, in my experience, this has only ever happened to me once. (Seriously!) Last year at university, I was in the canteen getting my lunch, and I handed over a £20 note to pay for around £3.50 worth of food. Well, the checkout operator gave me, in change, a £5 note, a £1 coin, a 50p coin, and a £20 note. Clearly she thought the £20 was a £10. Having worked on checkouts, I'm well aware that it's an easy mistake to make, as the £10s and £20s are stored in the same compartment. Thing is, I didn't actually realize I had been given £10 too much until later in the day. By that time, I wasn't going to go back and explain the mistake. And hey, I'm a student, I'm poor! I need the money... to spend on DVDs. :D

[Ace 777]

My vote would be to keep it, but for me it would depend on the situation.

I've found money in Banks and Supermarkets, and have handed in the money.

However, I've also found money in parks, beaches, casinos, and even out on the street. In those cases, I've put the money in my pocket as if it were my own :D

[Occhidiangela]

"keep" a dollar is pointless, unless you mean by keep it you put it into a savings account.

A dollar is more commonly spent, or donated.

What I usually do with money found on the ground, which is more typically coinage, is put it in my little inner slot in my car's arm rest, which usually holds all of the nickels and pennies I get in change for cash transactions, and drop the change into the little "help the __name__ lukemia fund" cans that are always on the counter at the gas station where I usually buy my automotive fuel whenever I fill up. A little at a time can't hurt.

The dollar found is homeless, as I see it, is like a penny or a nickel found on the ground. It needs a home.

Well, I give it a home where my hope is that it will do some good. :)

Finding a wallet or a purse, on the other hand, is direct to the police station for lost and found action.

[Mark]

People here will probably wonder about me after this but, I would be more tempted to keep it if it were $50 or $100. $1 is hardly worth my time and as such I'd leave it where it is. I figure my time is worth about $25 per hour so if it takes any longer than a few minutes to return the money it rapidly becomes a waist of time.

Remember I said I'd be tempted, not that I'd actually take it. B)

[Copadope]

If it's just one dollar, I'd keep it. Any coinage worth more than a penny I'll pick up and put in my pocket. (I only pick up pennies if they're heads-up, and then I put them in my shoe.) Finding money in a bank is different than finding money lying on the ground somewhere. Anything more than a dollar, I would turn in if I found it in a bank. But if I see a bill just lying on the ground and it's not obvious who it belongs to, I'll keep it no matter what the denomination. But if there's any chance of finding the true owner, I'll try to do so.

I was once on the opposite end of the stick in this situation... I managed to lose my entire wallet with over fifty dollars in it. I was on vacation at the beach and I had just bought myself a kite (otherwise I would've lost over $100), and I made the mistake of jumping in the ocean with my wallet still in my pocket :( . In less than two minutes, I realized I forgot to leave it with the car but it was too late. The ocean had robbed me. I scoured the beach to no avail and basically gave up hope of ever seeing it again.

Several days after returning from the trip, I was just about to go get a new driver's license when I got a phone call from the beach's lost and found. Lo and behold, someone had found my wallet and turned it in, and they looked me up by the info on my license. It was then mailed to me fully intact, with every cent present and accounted for. I gleefully picked up the package from the post office and took it home, dumped all the sand out of my wallet, and laid it out to dry.

I later realized that I should've tried to find out who turned it in while I was on the phone with L&F, but I was too happy to think about it then. I woulda sent them flowers or something.

Thank God for the kindness of strangers. :)

[Medicine Man]

I would keep the dollar and use it to invest in www.satan.com.

I guess I'm evil.

[Refrigerator]

If I found a bill just lying around on the street somewhere, yeah, I'd keep it. Probably.


It depends on the value though. $1 = Hey, cool. $20 = Sweet, money! 1,000,000, = Uhhhh whooaaa....
where is the nearest police station?

[LavCat]

Oh, *that* kind of bill! (I guess that's why this thread is in the lounge?) I was going to say I leave them on the ground unless they are green or gold, sometimes yellow...not usually worth selling.

If I saw a $1 bill sitting in a bank, I would leave it. (Particularly if it were Canadian.)

I once found a $5 bill on the ground and kept it. It was in the street and pretty obviously someone had dropped it. I doubt if I had left it in the street the money would ever have found its way back to its rightful owner. Nonetheless I'm not sure I did the right thing. I wish that I had never seen it.