I use my winter jacket as a purse. I hate carrying purses, so I buy jackets with lots of pockets to carry stuff in. The down side is that when the warm weather comes back, I transfer everything back to my warm-weather purse, and I’m pretty thorough about going through every pocket before I put the jacket away for the spring and summer.
That said, though, I’m usually quite pleased in the spring. The transfer of items from purse to jacket in the cold months is a gradual thing–first my wallet and phone, then the change purse, then the lip balm, etc. The transfer in the spring is deliberate, and I usually find forgotten money in a pocket of my abandoned purse as I’m doing the “spring cleaning.”
I found $8 in the dryer a couple of days ago. I know it wasn’t mine - I’m pretty sure it was my husband’s.
It’s mine now!
A couple of years ago, I found $100 in the dryer - five $20s. I gave it back to him and said, “You know, I appreciate the thought, but you don’t have to pay me to do your laundry.” He got this huge relieved look on his face and said, “I thought I lost that!”
I once put a bank envelope containing a whole week’s pay in cash in a purse and put the purse away. I found it four months later while cleaning out said purse. Totally forgot it was there.
I also found a hundred dollar bill in a public trashcan. I kept it.
I once washed, neatly folded, and put away a pair of pants I’d worn at my cashier job at a local restaurant after I’d quit.
Eight years later, I dug them out, thinking I could use them for something, tried them on - still fit! - stuck my hand into my left front pocket… and pulled out a fifty. A fifty! I went out for dinner that night. And I supersized it!
My favourite, though, was taking my old winter work coat out of the closet one year, and finding a Cadbury Truffle Egg - still wrapped - in one of the pockets. It was still good, too, I ate that sucker right the hell up. Just as delicious as it should have been.
I found $17 in a slush pile right outside the new Goodman theater a few years back–and I picked it right up. There was noone else around to even ask about it–it paid for our parking that noc (what the hell, why not).
I routinely find money in the laundry, and the kids know that whatever Mom finds in the laundry, is now hers. I figure that they might learn to clean out their pockets before washing so that in college, they don’t keep losing money…so far, it hasn’t worked, but doing laundry is quite profitable for me–$22 this week alone!
My biggest haul to date was some $586 dollars, representing the entirety of one of my boyfriend-at-the-time’s cashed paycheck I found in the laundry.
Some time before that, I told him that if he was going to ask me to do his laundry with my own, I’d damn well be keeping any cash I found in it.
I kept it.
He was livid about that, but in my view he had two options. He could either a) do his own damn laundry or b) do me the basic courtesy of cleaning out his pockets. For every instance of cash in the laundry there were at least 5 instances of something else - almost always something nasty as hell. Including, one particularly shining moment about a month before the paycheck incident where he left four caramels in his damn pocket. They survived the washer okay, but the dryer got them all over every garment in that load - totally ruining some of my clothes in the process.
I used his cash to buy some more clothes. Among other things
The other morning, I was cleaning out the little compartment in the door of my car and found a $20 stuffed in one of those drive-in bank envelopes that I must have forgotten.
I was changing out my old laptop bag/briefcase over the weekend to put things in the new/spiffy replacement and found a pair of contacts I must have left in there one weekend when I took it as an overnight bag somewhere.
For every 6 things I lose, I find 1. I suck at this game.
I usually stuff the extra fast-food napkins in my jacket pocket, so that’s all I usually find. I once found a pen, and small amounts of money a few times, and once or twice a mint from a restaurant. That’s pretty boring, mostly, but I once met a woman getting off the bus at my stop who was all tearful over meeting an old friend she hadn’t seen in years. I gave her a couple of those napkins to dry her eyes and we had a nice talk about old times (all hers!) for the block or so that we were going the same way. That was a nice day!
Also, since people are mentioning finding money on the ground, when I was a little kid of maybe five years old, I was walking along and saw a coin on the ground. When I reached to pick it up, I saw another half-covered, and another, and more and more as I brushed the dirt away! It was all small stuff and I don’t remember how much it came to, but it was a great haul for a little kid back in the mid-50s!
