Tales of honesty

Last year I was renovating a house for this Transport contractor (loaded), I moved a wardrobe out of its niche and found a brown envelope with about 7000€ in cash . After a couple of minutes with the Devil on one shoulder and my Mam (Angel) on the other ,anyway I give it to the guy who owned the house, he was totally surprised and then he proceeded to tell me that he had completely forgotten about it and would probally never have missed it!
(B$%§&/&KS I thought)
But there again I can sleep nights.

Related topic: The cashier gives you back too much change

You did the only decent thing.

If you'd taken it you'd be haunted for years that he'd one day notice the loss and call the police.

I once went to a shop toilet in a big department store in Japan, and found a wallet stuffed with money on the roll dispenser. I didn't take it, (either out of honesty or fear of hidden cameras and a guest appearance on You've Been Framed, who knows) but I also didn't hand it in... I left it sitting there and ran. All I could think was that if I picked it up to hand it in but was intercepted by the owner or Japanese store detectives on the way, they would think I was stealing it - and with ten words of Japanese I'd never convince them otherwise. So I did neither right nor wrong, just took a prudent or cowardly way out. Often wondered what happened in the end.

In our country we have a proverb "You are a good man, because you never had the chance or courage to become a bad one" .

Anyway, my question is this to everyone reading this thread:

If I give you tomorrow a full-day of independance , which you can do anything , and no one will remember a thing you are going to do tomorrow, and you will never get caught and never have to answer to anyone, how many of the honest , nice people among us will behave the same?

During a trip to Australia to visit family I decided to go to a local market alone. On my way home I crossed the street and noticed an envelope lying on the middle of the road with a $50 note sticking out. I picked it up and counted about $800. Strangly enough it was right near the police station so I thought i should do the right thing (i was so tempted to keep it though) and went to hand it in. This was in a tiny town in Tasmania and the station was closed... So after calling the help line I had to wait around for about an hour until a police officer finally turned up.

A couple of days later I got a call from a man who owned a hotel in the region. Apparently he had a wine stall at the market and someone had dropped the money on the way home but didn't notice it was gone until the next day. He took my address as he wanted to send me something to say thank you. Selfish me, here I was expecting a cash "thanks" or at least a free meal at his hotel. However, about a week later I found a tiny display plate (about 10 cm) with a blue-bird on it stuffed into the mail box of where i was staying... including a card of course.

I would. I don't do things that I consider morally appropriate because other people will think better of me. It's all about the way I see myself.

I found a wallet lying in the middle of my local supermarket carpark and it had the guys whole life in it. I reckon he'd driven off with it on the roof. I found his address, on his identity card and drove it round to his home where his mother was standing anxiously outside the house! He'd gone back to look for it and she had no way of contacting him, so I just handed it over and drove away. I hope he came home again before he reported it missing!

I know the Japs do some tacky TV shows but, Shoppers on the Crapper is a bit nuff even for them.

As you say though there is always a little touch of doubt that good intentions will be taken the wrong way!
I find it a problem if a child falls down or is lost in the shops ,do you take their hand or help them up?
I've had the experience a couple of times, the child starts screaming or making a fuss and everybody in the place looks at you as if your trying to molest the kid, not a very pleasant way to spend time in the shops!

I have a story, not about me but a coworker that still irks me.

I used to work at a retail store, and one of my coworkers found a 100 bill on the floor. Being the sweet person she is she put in the register with a note so if anyone came back we had it. Well a month passed and the girl asked me, the manager, what we should do with it. I said she found it so I figured she could keep it, but run it by the owner (small business)So the owner gave her 20 bucks, keeping 80 for himself and said thanks.

a few weeks ago i did a delivery and was given 400e to much,so after re-counting it i told them.
well they didnt say much,but as their good customers , i thought it was the correct thing to do...
but would have been a nice bonus.

You are all too honest. We need some balance. Can I change my post now to read, "so I took the cash, flushed the ID, and blew it all on tempura, tamagotchi and prostitutes" ?

I think you're better off drawing the attention of one of the shop workers.

My son was about 6years old we were near the Hauptbahnhof ,walking through the snow ,I'd told him off 2 or 3 times cos he was kicking snow all over the place as he went anyway he did it again and under the snow he found a "dog collar" ,It obviously belonged to one of those little yappy dogs cos it was so small, the leather was soaked but there was a small ID plate on it which was was made of Silver . We took it home and I rang the telephone nr ... next day this little old lady came to our appt.. she was over the moon that she had got the collar back and told us how happy little Tiddles would be(name changed to protect the innocent) I was thinking nutty as a fruitcake, nice but definitley one sandwich short of a picnic,
She then proceeded to hand my son a 100DM note as a reward. (lucky little blighter).

Before it got cold this year, one Sunday my youngest kids were down the street selling watercolor paintings they were making right beside a popular walking path. They were asking €0.10 apeice.

A really old lady stopped and bought one she liked for €10.00. My kids asked her twice if she wasn't shifting the decimal point (or, in this case, the comma), and she said that she was sure and that she was pleased to be a patron of the arts.

Agree and disagree. I don't believe in the concepts of right or wrong or a general morality but I do believe in a behaviour being in-line with or contradictory to societal norms. In order to survive (arguably) you do have to curb your behaviour to some degree so that it fits in with society.

I would love to show up to work naked tomorrow and if no one found out or remembered I probably would. However as you said, my personal moral code does not change just because no one could find out.

What if I find you place where you can do things you want to, even in this imperfect world?

I found a 3-year-old wandering alone in front of Sport Schuster (this was before it attacked pootle) one winter afternoon at 5. So I hunkered down to be at the same height, asked the kid his name and if he was out with Mom or Dad or anyone else. I got speach from the kid so I then asked him if I could lift him up to look for his Dad, set him on my shoulder and slowly did a full 360°. The Dad found us within two minutes and was very grateful, the kid didn't really realize what was happening and about five other people had stopped to watch how the situation developed and to recommend taking the kid straight to the police. No policy of looking away or askance.

Not surprising, since you're a woman...

Are you insane? Think of the frostbite!

If she uses the MVV think of the number of strip tickets folded the wrong way.

why though exactly? just to make a statement/surprise people or for some good practical reason that I can't think of?

I could have kidnapped him, tons of blond women in black coats in Munich, no way they would have found me.

But I'm not crazy. Last thing I wanted at the time was a 3-year-old.

No, the way I understood the question no one would notice.

Nudity is the most natural and comfortable state of being, nothing restricting or poking and pulling at you, I enjoy being naked. OK not necessarily in the middle of winter but there are plenty of times in the summer when we're sweltering where we'd be much more comfortable without clothes.

Ofcourse nowadays I am a perfectly honest german, but when I was a kid my moral compass didnt work that well yet. Once we waited at the Freising train station. Bored as I was, I started pressing buttons on the ticket machine and suddenly money came out. I pressed the same button again, and the same amount came out. I pressed again and again and again ... every time a handful of Deutschmark. I was old enough to know that 1 DM = 1 Rittersport chocolate, so I would have never stopped pressing the button, if not my mother finally saw what I was doing and interfered. She took me by the hand and forced me to go to the office, hand over the money (my pockets were almost bursting) and tell them that their machine was broken. The f**kers didnt even give me a reward, but my mom bought me something later. I think it was a game of boggle - I would rather have had the price of the game in chocolate.

When I was a kid, we were on the receiving end of honesty - we were holidaying in Austria, and one day went out for a mountain hike. My father stopped to tie his shoelaces, putting down his bag with all our money, passports, EC-card, etc. Only when we came back to the hotel, he noticed it was gone. My father could not remember where he lost it, so we did the same hiking tour again the next day, but didn't find it. When we returned to the hotel, wondering how to explain that we might not be able to pay for the rooms immediately, the hotel owner came to greet us, beaming. She said a bag had been found, and through a postcard she'd given us the other day the finder learned where to contact us. The finder turned out to be a little boy, on holidays with a group of catholic youths, and he had handed the bag straight in. There wasn't a penny missing. We were immensely relieved, as the boy could probably tell by the reward he got from us

If you knew at the time you found the money that 'footprints' would never lead back to you, would you have taken it? I always remember the phrase "The true measure of a man's character is what he will do if he believes he won't get caught" That is when you come to know your constitution and what you are made of.

I used to work on the side (weekends) helping an estate liquidator. One weekend we were liquidating a (deceased) jeweler's home, to the general public. All of the jewels were apparently out of the house; the family had dealt with that. I found a box tucked away in a closet, which contained various valuable items, one of them looked to be a large emerald of good quality (I know a thing or two about gemstones). I handed it over to my "boss", who got all weird and sheepish and really overwhelmed by my honesty. She took it away, "to be given to the family". It suddenly dawned on me that she probably had NO intention of doing that. I could never look at her the same way again.

I have this detailed theory concerning karma in real-life - basically karma as a meta-force, of which there are direct and indirect forms. Sometimes, when drunk, I'll bore people stupid by explaining it.

This ain't one of those times. Basically, even if people don't know who's doing good or evil to them, doing good still makes the world a better place, and I want to live in a better place. The more good you do to other people, the better your chances are of others doing good to you.

@MattT - That's genuinely profound.

I hate Hollywood movies, but I once stumbled across Pay It Forward on a long-haul flight and was struck by the simplicity of its message.

Most of what cheeses me off about Germany is that this sensibility is so appallingly absent in everyday life; but we can all gang up together and make a difference ... if all those other TTers would stop telling us to just shut up and accept things for how they are.

As I say, There was a couple of minutes of indecision , but I really don't think I could of taken the money.
I remember a few years ago in England , we were visiting family in a place called "Redcar" which used to be quite a nice town on the coast, now its just a dump,anyway I was on the beach with my son he was about 5 at the time and I took him on various rides i.e Donkeys swings etc. After a while we headed back to the car which took about 30 min.. thats when I noticed that my wallet was gone , credit cards, all the cash ,driving licence . I ran back to the beach and was retracing my steps head down looking for my wallet, pretty futile I thought when all of a sudden this scruffy young lad who I remembered from the swings came walking up to me with my wallet , it had fallen out of my pocket on the swings everything was there , he wouldn't take a penny reward either .
I felt a bit shamed because the whole time I had been there (Redcar) I had been thinking how rough and shabby the place had become and that we would probally get mugged, then something like this happens.

I never even considered keeping the emerald, but I do wish I had given it to the family myself, as I'm quite sure they never got it.

Being an estate liquidator can probably be very lucrative, if one is dishonest.

Some countries like Australia, etc they are more likely to think you are kidnapping their kid than thanking them. Unfortunately.

lads, you ever have those days where you want to shag almost every girl you see?

Even the butt-ugly ones?

Just before moving to Europe, I was doing some last minute shopping and found a wallet in the parking lot. I flipped it open and found the driver's license plus credit cards and other id. There was also lots of cash in there, but somehow I just never considered taking any of it. Didn't even occur to me. The guy lived just a few blocks away from my mother, and as I was planning to go see her later that day anyway, I swung by the man's house. Nobody was home, and I was leery of leaving the wallet in his mailbox since you could easily stick your hand in and grab what was in there, and I didn't have any way of hiding the fact that it was a wallet. So I left my business card and wrote a note on the back.

Not long afterwards, the man called me, and I drove over and personally handed over his wallet. He wanted to give me a reward, but I declined. So then he asked me the name of my favourite charity.

Around two weeks later, I got a card from the Diabetes Association, thanking me for a donation that had been done on my behalf. That really made me feel good!

For some reason I was surprised that the man went through with making the donation as a thank you gesture. I guess I'd gotten cynical and figured it was just empty talk. But he was honest, too.

I agree that what goes around comes around more often than not. Karma.

Found a 50euro note a couple of weeks ago.
Just the note all folded up and laying on the floor in a very very large carpark, seems someone dropped it on the way to the shop.

If karma actually exists then this must be my payback for being a good guy on many other occassions so I spent it on a nice bottle of scotch.

I was walking with a female friend of mine in China Town one weekend when she noticed at £10 note on the floor. She picked it up and quickly put it in her wallet. A few minutes further on she mentioned that she had seen the man dropping it but she refused to give it back to him! She wouldn't be persuaded otherwise and when we went to get a coffee later, she didn't even offer to buy me a drink with that money. I can't help but feel that she stole it if she saw him dropping it but never approached him.

I had missed this thread, so I have just spent a few minutes of feel-good reading. I just had to laugh at the above sentence. It could be me (except being Irish, of course ). Loved the story of the broken machine - am sorry it did not have a happy end.

Yes, your friend is unfortunately a thief. And you really wanted a coffee paid for with that money?!

My father used to say that something which doesn't belong to you - you will lose anyway. In some way or the other. I've found that to be always true. Scarily true.

I had the thought that if she was at least going to keep the money, that she could redeem a little positive karma by spreading the happiness! But she didn't even consider that. Shucks.

heeehee .. point taken - but you'd have probably lost the coffee in a rather unpleasant way .. so it's just as well!

Oh, m23, you shouldn't have given in like that .

I loved your indignation here:

This is a great thread!!!

banter... banter, milady! i am pretty certain urbanangel would have wrangled out that coffee if she'd REALLY wanted it

I lost a 50€ note in a big carpark a couple of weeks ago,I must of dropped it on my way to the shops (to buy medicine for Tiny Tim, and some ointment for my Grans Amputation wound) . Anyway to cut the matter short ,When can I expect to get my cash back?