Imagine this.
You buy an office desk on Craigslist. It costs you $150. You try to get it through a doorway in your home but the gap isn’t wide enough…by a fraction of an inch.
To get the desk through, you need to take it apart. Upon dismantling it, you discover hidden under the desk’s top a plastic bag. You open it up and to your utter astonishment it contains not $1,000, not even in $10,000, but 98,000 big ones.
Well, this just happened. Just like that. To a guy in Connecticut.
Like a movie
Speaking to BBC Radio about his unusual find, Rabbi Noah Muroff, a New Haven schoolteacher, said he felt, quite understandably, utterly shocked to stumble across the fat bag of cash.
“The first reaction that my wife and I had when we opened the bag and saw the money was one of complete and total disbelief. We said to each other that this only happens in the movies, we couldn’t believe it was happening.”
What to do?
You’re probably wondering if he returned the money or went out and bought a better desk with it, perhaps one constructed from expensive wood and offering horizontal cable management. Well, Muroff explained that when he went to collect the desk, the seller had mentioned in passing that she’d bought it from Staples and put it together herself.
“So I said to my wife that this is her money that was sitting in the desk the whole time,” Muroff said. “It’s clearly hers. So we had an obligation to return the money to her.”
He called the former owner within 10 minutes of finding the bag of Benjamins and arranged to return the money the following day, which he duly did. The woman told Muroff she’d received the money as an inheritance, put it inside the desk for safe keeping, and completely forgotten about it.
Wouldn’t it be great if all Craigslist purchases contained such surprises; just think of the pleasure you’d get from returning all those long-forgotten treasures to their grateful owners. I mean, you would hand them back, right?
[Via: BBC] [Image: Vasiliy Koval / Shutterstock]
