There were no envelopes full of money in my stack of mail this morning. Not that there usually are — in general, the mail varies between a few printed bills, a small selection of magazines, and the errant political fund-raising letter. Very occasionally there’s a check for services rendered, but those don’t usually arrive in printed form.  So yesterday I was taken aback to find not only much more mail than usual, but several envelopes that clearly contained actual cash. Note that this is not a recommended practice — never put actual money in the mail.

How bizarre. Several other envelopes from people I didn’t know looked like they contained one or two sheets of paper — possibly checks. After staring at one of these for a few seconds, I realized they weren’t in the right box. It’s not unusual for me to get mail addressed to someone else but properly delivered to my box number because someone got the address wrong. In this case, the post office employees had given me a whole stack of mail for a different (but very similar) box number. Clearly these envelopes were the result of a request for funds — you know, the “we desperately need your help” letters that we all get.

As far as I know, there’s no way anyone would have known what happened to the money if I’d just kept it. Cash payments are meant to be untraceable. Sure the donor could have complained to the organization who would have just said they didn’t receive it. At least the people sending checks would have been able to find out if the checks were cashed. But in the meantime, if I were a larcenous sort of person, I could have kept the cash and had several checking account numbers. Kind of scary.

Needless to say, I put the envelopes back into the postal system — they have a designated slot for misdirected mail — and went on with my day. Finding money on the sidewalk is one thing (not that that’s happened recently) but finding money that clearly was on its way elsewhere is another. Maybe the lottery gods will smile on me since I put that found money back into its proper place.  Stopped to buy a lottery ticket on the way home.

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