I haven’t gotten to be fabulously wealthy by luck or by accident. It has taken a lot of hard work and ingenuity but most of all, I have always made it my business to take care of every penny that has come my way. Because, as the old saying goes, take care of the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves. I am especially careful not to let money slip away from me while I am not looking.
That is why I was disturbed tonight to take a look at my PayPal account. For the past month, there has been a consistent amount in that account and suddenly, for no apparent reason, the amount has decreased by five percent. For the past 30 days, there has been 21 cents in my PayPal account, not a fortune, I will admit, but somewhere along the line I earned that 21 cents and it is mine. All mine. So imagine my distress tonight when I checked the account to discover that there is now only 20 cents in it. I examined my electronic statement from the company high and low and I am not able to discover what would explain the sudden drop in the total funds in my account. Somewhere along the line, a penny has disappeared and as I said earlier, by looking after my pennies, the dollars have always taken care of themselves.
That penny did not dissolve or otherwise disappear. It is still out there somewhere. Someone else, who might have had 30 cents in his PayPal account, now has 31 cents. PayPal is a very large company now and this is how the big financial institutions are ripping off the little guy. I want to know where my penny has gone and I will not rest till I get answers. Friday, if it takes me all day, I will be on the phone with PayPal, looking for my missing funds. If I have to go all the way up to the president of the company, I will. And if I have to sue someone to get my penny back, by God I am going to do it.
It might just be that I will have to take my 20 cents out of my account, which I will then close, and instead keep that money in a sock tucked under my mattress. Yes, some criminal might break in while I am away and steal it, but someone is stealing it anyway, so I would rather it be stolen from right under my nose.
I read years ago that it is not worth a man’s time to bend down and pick up a penny off the sidewalk if one is discovered lying there. Whoever wrote that story calculated the time it would take for a man to pick up that penny, and the author came to the conclusion that it was simply not worthwhile to make the effort. If it took a man one minute, for example, to pick up that penny, he would be working for 60 cents an hour and that just makes no sense at all.
But, I remember the days as a kid, scouring the ditches around our farm for pop bottles I could return to the store for two pennies. I also remember my first job on construction where I made 165 pennies every hour. So this is no small matter. I will have my penny and then I am going to lobby for a new law that prevents big companies from engaging in this sort of horrible wage theft.
©2019 Jim Hagarty
