I worked for Sam's Club around the turn of the millennium. Sam's is one of those pay to shop, membership required, big box stores where you can only buy 100 packs of paper towels and #10 cans of beans. For those of you not aquatinted with the #10 can, its the one that you imagine a cook on a navy vessel emptying into a huge vat of indescribable mush. I was almost twenty years old and going to college severely part-time and trying to figure out what I should do with my life so a job where I didn't have to try all that hard worked perfectly for me.
This day was the same as all the other I had worked previously until I walked outside for my lunch break. I didn't usually take my lunch outside of the store but it was a particularly beautiful day. Autumn in Northern Florida is a beautiful time. The rest of the year you'll die of heat stroke between your car and the stores front door. The store should have employed EMT's around the clock to keep the older customers from dying on their way inside.
While I was walking over to my car I noticed a wallet someone had left inside a cart. This wasn't a rarity at all people left wallets, purses and checkbooks all the time. So I picked up the wallet with the intention of putting it in the lost and found on my way back in from lunch. From this point forward I had the longest lunch break of my retail career.
I tossed the wallet carelessly onto my passenger seat and began eating my sandwich. After a few minutes of listening to "Car Talk" I noticed the wallet lying open on my passenger seat and I could see a very large collection of green. I immediately picked up the wallet and looked inside. There was almost $10,000 cash in this wallet. My thoughts went instantly to my last W-2 which had read "gross income: $8,324." This guy was carrying around more money that I made in a year. All one hundred dollar bills and all crisp and new. To say I was tempted to keep the money would be a gross understatement. I knew that no one saw me pick up this wallet and I new that no one would ever know that I had taken this money. I sat in the car staring at the money constantly thinking that I should keep it. The minutes dragged on and I assured myself that I would use the money for school or some other expense that was for the greater good. Like one day I'll cure cancer and taking that money will be forgiven.
I never looked at the ID. When it was time for me to return to work I simply went into our mangers office and turned in the wallet. Later, I heard that the man was a cardiologist down in our little beach side community on vacation and he had called the store several times to make sure that his money was safe and he would be back directly to pick it up. I never met the man. Not that I wanted a reward, but I think I would want to shake the hand of the person who turned in my $10,000 dollars instead of using it to fund his trip to medical school where he would have cured cancer. Later still, I had to suffer the embarrassment of being featured in the quarterly news magazine that the company put out so now not only did all the people who worked in my store know what a sap I was but everyone company wide knew.
To this day I don't know if I made the right decision. But, I'm not a thief. In a world of gray morals I guess this was my stand. Who knows what will happen next time I find $10,000 laying on the street.
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