DUMB AND DUMBER
My beautiful wife Carmela likes to go walking in the early morning, and along the way she pets all the dogs she sees and gives them doggie treats from her bag. She says hello to all the early morning folks out walking like herself, and gets a lot of exercise. One recent morning, as she went traipsing down the street, in the grass by the sidewalk she spots a $100 bill.
WOAH! A brand, spanking new $100-door bill with Benjamin Franklin’s face looking back at her. Carmela folded it up and brought it home from her walk and showed it to me. What should we do? Should we post on the internet that we found a $100 bill, and ask did anybody lose it? The problem being, of course, that more-than-one anybody could say they lost it, but nobody would be able to verify it.
Carmela is very honest. She doesn’t want to profit from somebody else’s misfortune, so she decides – and I agree – to donate the $100 to Robyne’s Nest, a local Orange County charity that provides housing and other amenities for at-risk and homeless high school students who have little or no parental support.
It’s a good organization and if you’re interested you can find out more about it at:
We both agree that it would be a good thing to donate the money to Robyne’s Nest, so we could at least turn somebody’s misfortune into something good for the community. So, Carmela celebrated her discovery by donating $100 to Robne’s Nest, and since she was in such a good mood, she matched it with another $100 of our money, plus she paid the $7.75 fee for using Pay Pal to make the transaction.
So far, so good. But we still had the original $100 bill that needed to be spent.
No problem. We had planned to go shopping at the huge Mercardo Gongalez, Mexican market in Costa Mesa. I tucked the bill in my wallet to pay for our purchases. When the cashier tallied up our purchases and I gave her Carmela’s found $100 bill to pay for it, she politely declined.
I was shocked. What’s wrong with the bill, I asked. She flipped it over to the back side – the one without Benjamin Franklin’s Face on it, where it said in clear and unmistakable print: “Movie Money, not real.”
To her credit, the cashier just laughed and handed the bill back and we paid in regular old $20s and $1s. I’m not sure whether she was laughing at how shocked we obviously were or how stupid we were, but I suspect it was a bit of both.
Carmela and I laughed about it for the same reason.
How could we have been so dumb?
I think Carmela was caught up in the spirit of doing the right thing, because that’s who she is.
And me? I have no real excuse. I love my wife, and I’m not too smart.
Let that be a lesson to us both.
– George Lee Cunningham
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