Returning A Lost Wallet

Service Champions technician Frank pulled up to the curb across the street from a Corona home where he had a service call scheduled. Before he got out of his van, a truck pulled in and parked behind him, but Frank didn’t think much about it.

Then as Frank got out, he noticed a wallet lying right next to the truck’s door. Frank looked up and saw people at a nearby home standing at the entrance with the door open. He walked up to them.

“Hey, I just found a wallet near that truck,” Frank said. “Anyone missing one?”

All the men checked and sure enough one of them found he had dropped it. For Frank, it was no big deal, “what anyone would have done,” as he put it. Frank went on to the service call at the house across the street and did the work. Normal day’s work, with an honest deed thrown in for good measure.

It would be 8 months later when Frank discovered that the man with the missing wallet was in the middle of an extraordinarily heartbreaking day, and Frank’s small act of honesty had kept it from being even worse.

Other Good Deeds

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“Several months later I got assigned to a job in the same neighborhood, and sure enough, it was the house where I had returned the wallet,” Frank said.

And the same man came to the door.

“Do you remember me?”

“Actually, I do, you’re the one that brought my wallet back,” he said. What he said next shocked Frank.

It turns out that his wife had died the very day the wallet was returned. When he pulled up and parked behind Frank, he had just come directly from the hospital. He was a bit dazed at the time and confessed that even now months later he was still in the early stages of grieving.

He also told Frank that he had taken important documents from his wife’s purse and put it in his wallet before he had left the hospital. “I’m so thankful you found my wallet, because it had all her information and I needed all that stuff to plan the funeral.”

As it happens, Frank lives in Corona and still sees the man and his son from time to time and says hello. The man is a retired firefighter and his son has followed in his footsteps. “Just a great family and a genuinely nice guy,” is how Frank describes him.

Frank knows returning a wallet didn’t change the deep sadness of the day, but it does serve as a reminder of the importance of small acts of kindness to others.

“You don’t know what people might be going through,” Frank said. “I tell my kids to be patient with people because you don’t know what might have happened to them 10 minutes ago.”

Great lesson and a Good Deed, too. Thanks for your honesty and kindness Frank!