F the Recession!! Viva the power of a dollar!!

Who says a buck doesn't get you what it used to?

The impending economic recession is the new Global Warming. At least according to the paper, the internet, the television and any idiot who makes money by panicking the sheep. The rising cost of gas is absurd. The logical, economics-based reason for the increase is still more absurd. What pisses me off the most is not that the Oil industry can manipulate their own trading prices (and by extension, their profit) by creating false demand by cutting back production, but that the media insists on over reporting the stories of economic doom. Self fulfilling prophecy anyone?

Still, with the "black cloud" hanging over my investments, I discovered today that even though the dollar is nearing its weakest point since I started earning them, you'd be surprised what you can get for a buck.

Today, I was working at my new, temporary job (Best Buy Loss Prevention...for another 4 days) when I noticed a Mother and her son leaving the store. I wished them a nice day, and they smiled and walked out. A few moments later, they came back into the store. The Mother sheepishly told me her son had been carrying a dollar he had been saving to buy his father a gift and that he had lost it somewhere in the store. Clearly, she held out no hope that the money would be found and that it wasn't that big of a deal. From the look on his face, it was a big deal to her son.

The kid was about 9 or so, had red hair and kinda looked like I did back in the day. The thing that struck me was the look on his face. The mixture of profound guilt and despair. Those hundred pennies may not mean much to us, but to him it was a whole dollar. He knew he had it...and he lost it...and it was nobody's fault but his own. He diligently searched every place he had been to to no avail. He reminded me of me.

I remember losing fifty cents once from a pocket in my shoe leaving me short on a movie ticket. I spent an hour combing the mall floors trying to reverse my foul fortune. Beseeching strangers proved to be humiliating and fruitless. I imagined that he must feel now, the same as I felt then.

When he came back to the front of the store, holding his mother's hand he seemed resigned to his fate and ready to deal with the consequences of having lost the money. I stopped them on the way out and produced a dollar bill from my shirt pocket. The mother said that I didn't have to do that. I told her I knew that, but that everyone deserves to be delivered from a bit of sadness from time to time. The kid's eyes lit up and suddenly all was right in his world again. He walked out, but came back in again to thank me on his own for the dollar. I told him no worries and to be a good boy. He nodded his head vigorously that he would.

What can you get for a dollar? The moral of this story isn't what the boy got out of receiving my hundred pennies, but rather what I got out of giving it to him. For the low, low price of a dollar (largely forgotten in my shirt pocket) I got to make a positive difference in two people's day. Actually my low budget deus ex machina made three people smile.

I'm still smiling about it now. Money well spent, recession be damned.