When my brother was in Boy Scouts, they had this "penny thing" that they did. In the morning, each good little Cub/Boy/Eagle Scout put a penny in his right pocket. It was there to remind him to do a good dead for the day. As soon as he did that deed, he moved the penny over to his left pocket. Kind of a nice little trick to remind you to care about others, right? Well, I don't have a job and cannot afford to throw pennies around like, well, pennies. Besides the point. I like the idea of doing good on a daily basis and try to incorporate that into my life (when I remember).
Anyway, I was walking down the street yesterday and saw a wallet on the ground. It was one of those Velcro wallets we all had in the 5th grade to put our babysitting and allowance money in. It was also camouflage. I looked down at it and thought "There's no way anyone is missing this wallet. There is nothing of importance in there." As I walked a few feet further, I felt guilty about passing it by; there could be a lot of money in the Velcro wallet (yeah right) that someone needed or, more heart breaking, some kid had lost his first wallet and he was really upset.
So, I looked like the idiot on the street who turns around as I walked back down the sidewalk towards the wallet. I bent over to pick it up and turned it over in my hand so that the Velcro was facing me and I could open it. As I turned it over, I noticed a couple brown spots on the front (if you ask me, not very camouflage if you can see DIRT on it) but thought nothing of it.
As I unfolded the Velcro, something didn't seem quite right. The wallet didn't pop open like I had expected, it was sticking. With the Velcro now undone, I started to peel the wallet open and realized within milliseconds that there was shit in the wallet. Now when I say shit, I don't mean it was empty and I had wasted 30 seconds of my life on a good deed to open a wallet to find nothing; I mean literally, there was SHIT in the wallet. I didn't have to open it more than an eighth of an inch to realize I had been duped. I think I may have yelled a profanity or two as I threw the wallet down onto the grass and walked away.
I didn’t see any kids snickering in the windows behind me but if they’re out there, I’m sure they aren’t Boy Scouts.