When I was a kid, I always wanted to rob a bank. I guess it looked great in the movie Westerns. I know the endings for most of robberies weren't picture perfect, but I thought of myself as a Jessie James kind of thief. I even thought of a plan on how to steal from my local branch. All I needed were the trusty band of ragtag kids on my block. But it never happened and my fantasy of ending up in Hawaii with a margarita in my hand and a bunch of cash in my pocket was left to my dear friends in Hollywood.
Then almost a year ago, a large gift was deposited into my bank account. The gift of 20,000 appeared out of nowhere. It happened to be electronic mistake on the part of a teller. All of a sudden the dream of robbing a bank came flashing back to me, like when I was young boy.
Why did the money appear? Should I buy a car, a house, or make a run to Vegas? Should I close my account and go on the lam? The thought of telling the bank they made a mistake never even crossed my mind. I think that was wannabe bank robber in me. But the big question of going to jail if I took it did.
So I debated and spoke to a few people about it. Surprisingly enough, many of them told me not to take the money. "They'll find it," said People. "They always do." However, a few said that I should take the money and run. "They'll have to track you down," said Other People. "They'll never catch you." But no matter how many people I spoke to about the situation said to tell the bank they made a mistake.
I finally decided that the best thing to do was a finder's keeper rule. If the cash stayed in my account for a year, then it was mine for the taking and they weren't entitled to have it anymore. I figured out the mistake was due to CD I transferred. The teller transferred it twice.
As I waited, I started to take money out the bank that was originally mine. A couple of thousand dollars here, a couple of thousand dollars there. My idea was that if at some point during the year the bank actually found out about their mistake, they would be able to get all their money back without accusing me of stealing it.
With months in the bag and the one-year over the horizon, the market plummeted and companies started to go bankrupt and lose billions of dollars. I guess that's why the found it. For seven long months the cash was in my account. It was sweet to fantasize what I was going to do with it for that long, but it wasn't meant to be. And that ended my fantastical adventures of being just like Jessie James.
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