$11
I was buying ice cream at Cold Stone a couple days ago when presented with a conundrum that has bothered me ever since. I lay it out here for your consideration (and my own).While standing in line, I found $11 on the floor. I'm pretty sure it wasn't there when I first started looking at the ice creams, which means that somebody in the line probably dropped it--and whoever it was probably still was in that line, or at least in the store, when I found the cash. Brilliantly, I announced that I had just found $11 on the floor. Whose was it?
Predictably, I suppose, no fewer than six people claimed the cash as their own. Well now, what to do? Nobody gave up their claim, and in the end there was just no way to decide between them. I kept the $11 (and subsequently put 10 of it into the United Homeless Organization's collection bin, feeling something of a guilty conscience).
Nobody in the crowded shop complained at this except those who said it was their money in the first place, so I take that as a tacit statement that this was fair. Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure that somebody got screwed out of their money. I was in a store--they easily could have given me change for a ten and a one, and I could have divided the money up between all the claimants. But that doesn't really seem fair, either; five of them were lying, after all. At least I was telling the truth when I walked out with the cash.
But that seems suspiciously ex post facto, as an attempt to justify the fact that I left the shop $11 richer for no apparent reason. What's more, I'm pretty sure that one of them was telling the truth, too, since I really do think that whoever dropped the money was probably in the store at that moment. Obviously, the cash was more rightfully that person's money than my own.
The problem here is not what I did, so much as the fact that I don't really know what I should have done. If presented with the same situation, would I handle it any better? I don't really think so.
I might not announce the amount, of course, and that seems like a sound starting point. But I also know that I never know exactly how much cash I'm carrying. If I lost $11, I might be able to see that I'm a bit short, and I might even know that I had a 10-dollar bill in there which appears now to be missing. But I'd never manage to get the exact amount with any certainty.
I imagine that others are like me in this way. I may be wrong, and, in a similar situation, there may indeed be somebody who can claim his exact loss. But if not, how does one handle this? I mean, I walked out of the store with somebody else's money, and that person was probably right there telling me that it was hers. And if so, she got totally screwed.
posted by Skay @ 11:45 PM
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