Make Of It What You Wish

Three stories...generalize as you like.

This morning, after searching in every possible place, I had to admit that the little coin purse which had my free subway pass was lost. The purse didn't have much money, but that wasn't my concern. The problem was that I had just replaced my subway pass last Friday after having lost my original one, and there was no way I wanted to go back three or four days later  and sign a "declaration of a lost ticket" again.


I went to SESC (I'm not going to explain SESC; see earlier posts if you want to know.) like I do about four times per week and, with nothing to lose, I went to the lost and found area and asked if a coin purse had been turned in yesterday.  It had been, with everything intact.


Back in the early 1980s I was working as a temp at General Mills Headquarters, in the Building Services Department, which included the lost and found department.  I had just finished complaining to a co-worker one day that I was missing a $20 bill, that it must have fallen out of my pocket at the company store when I bought my daily newspaper. Thirty minutes later, somebody came in to report that they had found a $20 bill in the company store.  I can't even imagine being so trusting as to turn in cash.


Finally, in 2003 (I think), I had arranged my vacation in Thailand so that I had a 3 or 4-day stop in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on the way out, and about an 18-hour stop there on the way back to California. Things went really wrong on the way back and I arrived in KL sometime after midnight, several hours late, and really, really tired. I made a quick phone call and then caught the train into the city. Just as the train was leaving, I realized I had left a bag on the floor next to the phone. I checked the next day to see if it had been turned in to lost and found, but it wasn't there. About three months later, the bag was returned to me in California. It turns out it had been turned in at the airport in KL and, because a copy of my flight information was in the bag, it had been sent to LA, probably on the same flight that I took.  The delay was in getting it from LA to Tulare, California.


Again, generalize as you wish, but one possibility is that people the world over are basically honest.