A QOTD from elsewhere
(Today's vox qotd sucked, so I grabbed this one from elsewhere.)
You're cleaning out your garage and, hidden away in a back corner, you find an old shoebox. The box is heavier than it should be. When you open it up, you find cash—$40,000, to be exact. Where did the cash come from, who hid it there and why?
My first thought upon finding said box would be to wonder what my kids have been up to. Because they're the most likely to come across such a box and claim it for their own. Of course, with my luck they would spend the money on cheap plastic crap and sticky hands I would spend all of eternity scraping from my ceilings.
So, where would the kids have come across that kind of dough? Well, there is the neighbor who is always handing them odd things he has found while cleaning out his garage...maybe he thought the box contained his son's old baseball cards or something. Hey--maybe the box IS full of baseball cards, and they're rare enough to be worth 40 grand. Hmmm...what are the chances that one of my neighbors would have a Babe Ruth rookie card? And that it wouldn't have fallen apart in an un-airconditioned garage in a TExas summer. Ok, that approaches zero. Never mind.
As for someone HERE earning and hiding away that kind of money--well, I suppose it's a better investment than an IRA these days. You could open that envelope without dread. Ok, maybe dread, as a roach would crawl out or something. Or, again, the kids would find it and spend the cash on Cheap Plastic Crap.
I guess it is possible that the original owners of the house left the box behind, and we've just been extremely remiss in cleaning in the corners. Or it's up on a shelf--that's acutally possible, as I know *I* never see anything above my own height. Make it 5'10" and it might as well be on the moon. I can even hide chocolate from myself that way. Chocolate? I have chocolate? Wow!!!
An extra forty thousand dollars, of course, would be a fun thing to find. Of course, I'm honest enough that I would feel the need to report it to the cops or something. But then, it is MY garage, and has been for a dozen years. Someone else claiming ownership would be a legal stretch. (And with my luck, notifying the police would mean that the money was dirty in some way--a quickly stashed bank robber or a really lazy money launderer. And remember, where there are money launderers there are sleazy Columbian drug lords. Unless it's the seventies, and then it can be a sleazy Cuban driug lord. Just as long as he isn't pro-Castro.
A more satisfying queston would include my plans for spending the forty thousand dollars. ah, financial security. Or countless designer sunglasses. It's really kind of a toss-up. Pay off the mortgage or be really styling. Can you really put a price on eye health?