Image via WikipediaNormally I am of the philosophy that found money is something I want more of. If I'm walking down the street and find a quarter/a dollar/ten dollars!/twenty dollars!! That's a good day. Yet today when I found ten bucks at school I felt nothing but dirty. Here's what happened:
I stepped out of my class so my students could fill out their student evaluations. I moseyed down the hall as I am wont to do at times like this and--wham--there was a five dollar bill at my feet. I looked around. On each side of the hall there was one or two students hanging around, waiting for the next class to start, but in the near vicinity of the money there was no one. There was really no way anyone could possbly know who that money belonged to. So, feeling a little cheap because I am after all supposed to a PROFESSIONAL, I grabbed that money and stuffed it in my pocket and gave a silent, "WOO HOO!"
Almost instantly, I felt bad. My students are working class kids. They work so hard to be at school and here I was woo-hooing at their expense. Fleetingly, I thought: "I should just drop this money. Yes, I should drop it on my way to my car. I should let someone else experience the joy of a found money moment. But then the greedy part of me said, "Keep the money. You deserve this money because you lost your cell phone on Tuesday and that is karma's way of evening the score."
So I went into my class, and I even told me class what happened. I even pulled the money out of my pocket to show them. Only then did I realize there were two fives folded together. It was TEN dollars. You could tell by the looks on their faces that they really believed they deserved to find that money. I told them about my cell phone, but that did not seem to convince them. One students said, "You should give the money to me." But then a few more said, "You should just the money. It's not like you can find who it belonged to." Still, I felt bad, so I said, "I think I'm just going to drop this money on the way to my car--don't follow me."
For a few minutes, I really believed I would drop the money. Then I thought, I'll drop ONE of the fives. But who was I kidding? That money is right here on my desk staring up at me.
You go through life thinking you are a certain kind of person, and then something like this happens and you know that, really, you are a different kind of person, a worse person.
So what do you think? What would you do?
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