When you mind your own business you will never get caught up in all the nonsense. - Gee Linder
picture by me
Hello Hello and Happy Weekend Hive
So there we were, coming back from the Kebab shop after a heavy night on the town, when I tripped. I looked down to see what I had tripped over, and saw that it was a wee bag.
Nosey me bent over and picked up the bag. It was actually more of a blue drawstring pouch than a bag. Handing my kebab over to the closest person I opened up the bag and pulled out some paper.
Paper my a$ this was a wadge of dollar bills, amounting to a total of $250 dollars.
Quite what this was doing on a Scottish street, I have no idea. However, as I am in Fife and this is the home of golf, the bag and cash probably belongs to some American tourist who is here for the golf. In which case, they are probably rich and would not even miss it.
Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers I say out loud to nobody in particular.
Most people know this idiom as a children’s rhyme. However, it is quite old. Sources put the earliest written uses of this general expression at 200 B.C., by the Roman playwright Plautus.
This basically means that anyone who finds something, well they can keep it. If someone loses something then tough luck!
If it had been a one or even a twenty dollar bill, then no questions asked I am sure that virtually everyone, me included would keep the one dollar find.
But $250 I am not so sure!
Imagine that we find a dollar bill, and then we find one seven days in a row. Yep we would keep it, so now would have kept $7 dollars.
What about if we found that dollar bill for 250 days in a row! That is $250 that you would have found over a duration of 250 days. Myself and most people would have kept this money right? Would you have kept it too?
So what is the difference between that $250 and the $250 we found all at once?
Morally is it right or wrong? I think if I found the $250 I would feel pretty happy initially, then think about who had lost it. In the scenario above about being a rich tourist who probably had lost it, I may well have just kept it, or more realistically if this was after the partaking of a few libations and me being a gambler, I would toss a coin.
That is what I would have done.
But what if there was no police station in my town? Would I spend twenty dollars the next day to get a train to the next town and waste an hour or two of my day to do it? It really is adding up more and more to me keeping the money.
So from an ethical point of view, it would be kindest to hand the money in. What would be going through the mind of the person who lost it? How would I feel if I had lost it?
If it was me who had lost it, I would have cursed myself from head to foot, accept the money was lost and move on with my life.
What about the legality of handing it in?
This varies from country to country.
In the UK, there is a law surrounding keeping the money you find in public, known as ‘theft by finding’.
This means that if you find cash on the street and don’t attempt to return it to its owner – by handing it into the police for example – you’re guilty of theft.
Not only that but you can be prosecuted and there have been some recent cases, one even for £20!
Have a read about Sylvester below.
Sylvester Nowak was hauled before the courts after he picked up a leather bum bag that had been dropped on a car park, and kept the cash inside.
He made no attempt to find out who had lost the money and, according to UK law, he had committed the offence of theft by finding.
Nowak, who lived in Fenton at the time and is now homeless, was ordered to pay back £600 to the person who dropped the cash, at a rate of £20 a month. He claimed there was only £310 in the bag.
Do you think Sylvester was unfairly treated?
So hangover or not, I would make an effort to find the owner and then turn the money I found on the street into a police station. If after 28 days it is unclaimed, then it may be returned to me.
If the money was returned to me, then I would go down to the local High Street, and split the cash equally amongst the charity shops that are there.
This has been an interesting wee research for a post in relation to Topic 2 Found $250 of WE 94 Weekend Engagement post which can be found here.
It just shows you never how a path will turn out once you walk down it. There was I getting ready to say what I would do with the money, when it turns out there is only outcome here in the UK, and that is take it straight down to the nearest cop shop!
Enjoy the rest of your weekend, and a big thanks to 