Honesty and Greed

Dear Young Man,

Your actions last night has been quite a revelation as to how honest and greedy can be nowdays. And that I should be exceedingly careful as to how much I should trust people around me. Just a few minutes and a few, short steps would have gone a long way to restore my faith in mankind.

Having had a problem with losing things recently, I had my phone case hooked to my belt, and I was at the Safeway store, waiting in line to pay for my purchases. I remember very distinctly looking at my Blackberry, browsing the web. When I got close enough to put the staples on the conveyer belt, I remember putting my phone into the case and thinking that it was there, paid for the purchase, and then walked out to my car.

As I was putting the bags into the car, I decided to check the phone. To my dismay, I discovered that it was not in the case. I looked in the bags, checked the car floor on the chance that it may have fell out. No such luck. Looked around my well-lit parking spot - nope. I went back into the store, looked around the checkout lane. Nope, not there. I then went to Customer Services but nobody had turned it in.

Dejected, I went home and waited for Hubby to come home. In the meantime, I tore apart my car, with a flashlight as my guide, all to no avail. Finally Hubby came home and told him what had happened. He gave me the "oh, no, here we go" expression. We went back to the grocery store and we looked at the checkout lane, talked to the saleslady, and spoke to the manager.

As soon as we got back home, he sent out a page from his BB asking for whoever found my phone to get in touch with him. We called up Verizon and had them disconnect and deactivate my phone, and was assured that as we had gotten insurance, we could have the phone replaced with a charge fee.

Fortunately, your relative called Hubby later that evening. The story that Hubby was able to put together seems rather shaky. Apparently you found it in the store, put it in your pocket and walked out.

You do know where I'm going with this? It wouldn't have killed you to take one minute to walk less than 10 steps over to Customer Service in order to turn in the phone. I guess when you discovered that you couldn't use the phone because we'd deactivated it, you didn't need it burning a hole in your pant and gave it to your relative to turn over to my Hubby, who had to drive all the way down on Beltway to a fast food joint 25 miles away. Technically, you would have committed theft by taking expensive property that didn't belong to you.

I really hope Karma doesn't hit back at you big time - it would truly suck, wouldn't it?

Yours sincerely,

Disappointed and Distrustful