The Ned Wood Archive

Sam

That’s it.  They’re done.  Sam’s finished his last shift, ditched his PPE, showered, and changed.  He’s grabbed his lunch and has sat down with some of the gang.  He still hasn’t decided whether to see Bryan Ferry, though he’s not sure who else he’d see.  Hasn’t got anything major planned before then.  Not in a rush to get off.

Lex asks him when he’s going to buy that round and then explains to Anne and Samanfa, who are sat with them, what he’d found.  Anne suggests that he should maybe think about donating the cash to charity and this prompts a discussion on whether any of them would keep any cash that they found.  

“Small change you’d keep, obviously,” says Sam.  He found about five quid in change when he was litter picking that one year and kept that.  But then, most of them make a reasonable donation through the festival each year.  Instead of the entrance fee.

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t keep a thousand quid if you found a bundle of notes,” says Samanfa.  They’d been having a discussion earlier over the weekend with someone who worked in lost property.  They were saying someone handed in a roll of notes.  It was a specific amount, like £1200 or £780 or something.  Not a round number like a grand.  And the story was that someone went in and asked for that exact amount.  And they’d all been saying that it was maybe an urban myth or maybe it was someone doing a test.  Like candid camera.  You put down some fake notes and see what Joe Public does.

“Yeah, I’d hand that in,” says Sam.  That’s the consensus.  But where’s the boundary?

“One thousand I’d hand in.  One hundred, I’d give to charity.  Fifty quid, I’d keep to myself,” says Anne.

“There you go,” says Lex to Sam.  “What’ve you got?”

Sam opens up the magic wallet and pulls out the two crisp twenties.  

“Funny thing is, someone deliberately hid the wallet in a pair of plastic cups,” Sam tells them.

“There you go.  You’re on candid camera,” says Anne.

“I think someone found this, but didn’t notice the notes,” explains Sam, opening and closing the wallet both ways to show them how that could have happened.  Then he notices a small scrap of paper with a mobile number on it.

“Sorry, guys, it looks like we’ve got a contact number on this one.”

“Yeah, you better phone them up and see whether they want it.”   

Sam has to think about this for a couple of minutes.  Is he allowed to phone the number or should he get someone else to do it?  Greedily, he decides he wants the good karma from handing over the cash, so he turns his phone on and calls.  No answer.

“They’re not gonna pick up to any caller, are they?” says Lex.  “You better text them.”  So he does: “Found your wallet.  There’s still some cash in it.  Shall I bring it to you?”

The reply comes back: “Not my wallet”

Sam decides to be a bit more verbose.  His texts are always fairly long-winded compared to the average person’s, so it’s not that difficult.

“I work in the recycling centre.  I rescued a wallet containing your number plus some cash from the litter this morning.”   This obviously has a more positive impact.  The person at the other end agrees to meet.