Jaw Breaker wrote:
On Friday, I found a bunch of lottery tickets on the floor of the elevator as I left the office. They appeared to be for some kind of mid-day drawing (jeez, once a day isn't enough?) so I figured they were already determined to be losers and discarded, and not simply dropped/lost.
On the way home, I was thinking about what would happen if one of those tickets was actually a million-dollar winner and what the moral implications would be. Let's say the person who bought the tickets had accidentally dropped them and then bought replacements (assume the original tickets and the replacements were quick-picks). Now let's say I subsequently find out that person is a co-worker.
Scenario 1: An original ticket (which I hold) is a million-dollar winner. Should I return it or share it with the co-worker who lost it?
Scenario 2: A replacement ticket is the winner. Should the co-worker give it to or share it with me (since he would not have purchased it unless he had lost it in the first place)?
What if the original ticket was a winner but you didn't know the purchaser? Would you seek him/her out? On one hand, you found something that was eventually worth a lot of money...but at the time it may not have been known (pre-drawing), and if the person bought replacement tickets, does that person have a moral claim to the original quick-pick tickets?
It's immoral to give a moron who lost a million dollar ticket his money back.
At least once every couple months at the OTB I'll walk up to a betting machine to find some goof has left a live voucher in there. I've come across as much as $400 and as little as $12. I can't exactly yell out, "Hey who left this voucher here?" as there likely would be a line of assholes screaming it was theirs. I don't want to turn it in to management because if the guy never comes looking for it, they aren't going to hand me back the money. The manager would probably stick it in his own pocket. And I go in the place too often to cash it immediately and run out the door. (Although if I found one for over $5000 I might think about it.) So I just hold onto the thing and stick it in a machine at the end of the night. Usually it's been locked so I know the guy went and reported it missing and they gave him the dough. But I think you should be on your own if you're dumb enough to lose a big ticket. It's a good lesson learned.
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