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- Jul 27, 2010
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What is the most expensive thing you ever found and what did you do with it? Did you keep it? Return it to it's owner?
My only example is also an example of personal failure. When my ship went into dry dock for overhaul, the crew had to move into floating berthing barge. Every serviceman who moves into a new living arrangement knows the cleaning involved before moving in. We were all assigned different spaces to clean and I ended up in a bathroom/head. I was a hard charger back then trying to do my best, and I climbed the angle irons to deep clean. I found a serviceman's wallet with a couple hundred dollars in it. The wallet had been there for a couple of years. I wanted to return it to the owner and had every intention of doing so. You can throw a wallet like that into and post office box and theoretically it would return to the owner if he was still in the Navy. But if I did that, there is no way the money would have made it to him. There were no credit cards with only a DL and a military ID inside. That extra step of sending the wallet to a home address made me delay doing the right thing. The longer I delayed, the more reasons I could find to not do it. Eventually, I "borrowed" from the wallet over the months, until there was nothing left. I finally dumped the empty wallet into a postal box, after all. I learned to never delay doing the right thing.
It would be harder to give back very valuable things like gold coins and cash that have no identifiers as to who owned them, especially if the sense is that they had been lost for decades. Or, what about a bag full of hundred dollar bills, which is probably drug money? Keep it or turn it over to authorities?
My only example is also an example of personal failure. When my ship went into dry dock for overhaul, the crew had to move into floating berthing barge. Every serviceman who moves into a new living arrangement knows the cleaning involved before moving in. We were all assigned different spaces to clean and I ended up in a bathroom/head. I was a hard charger back then trying to do my best, and I climbed the angle irons to deep clean. I found a serviceman's wallet with a couple hundred dollars in it. The wallet had been there for a couple of years. I wanted to return it to the owner and had every intention of doing so. You can throw a wallet like that into and post office box and theoretically it would return to the owner if he was still in the Navy. But if I did that, there is no way the money would have made it to him. There were no credit cards with only a DL and a military ID inside. That extra step of sending the wallet to a home address made me delay doing the right thing. The longer I delayed, the more reasons I could find to not do it. Eventually, I "borrowed" from the wallet over the months, until there was nothing left. I finally dumped the empty wallet into a postal box, after all. I learned to never delay doing the right thing.
It would be harder to give back very valuable things like gold coins and cash that have no identifiers as to who owned them, especially if the sense is that they had been lost for decades. Or, what about a bag full of hundred dollar bills, which is probably drug money? Keep it or turn it over to authorities?
