Okay, this is seriously pissing me off. If a few swears get dropped here, please don't freak out. I feel that such language is beyond fitting for this bull.
So, I'm a member of my school's National Honor Society. With our latest community service project, we had to make donation cans for UNICEF and put them in local businesses to collect change. These normally fill up pretty damn quickly. I printed out the pretty PDF from the site to put on the can and shooped it a bit to give credit to my school, and even seeded it with a bit of my own money to increase donations from other people. We were supposed to leave the cans there until after Halloween so they could accumulate change from the local consumers. I put it on the check out counter at my local Tedeschi's where everyone would see it and hopefully put in their spare change.
In our last weekly National Honor Society meeting at school, others had said that their cans were filling up quickly. Someone had already come in with a manila envelope full of about thirty dollars in change. Another person got fourteen dollars in one night at a special event. Excited, but not overly hopeful, I decided to still collect my money after Halloween.
But I came in today without any such luck. I walked in to Tedeschi's, and the first thing I had to say was, "Where the hell did it go?" It was a different cashier than from the time when I put the can in, so I explained that it was a UNICEF donation can I put there as a National Honor Society project. My dad found the can in a corner to the side of the counter, underneath the cigarette lighters.
My first reaction was, "Are you [expletive] kidding me?"
There was maybe fifty cents more than what I'd seeded it with two weeks before. Therefore, it must have been moved either the day of or the day after I put it there. My guess is that an employee moved it to make room for their tip jar. With a simple, "I hate people," I turned and left.
Honestly, I expected more from a business located across the street from a Synagogue in a rich Jewish suburb. (Then again, I guess everyone in Massachusetts is hoarding their money in fear of our monstrous income tax. >.>)
What does this say about where our society is going? People aren't even willing to leave a donation can out for sick and poor children! I find this utterly ridiculous. If you don't want to donate, so be it, but don't be an asshole and move the can out of sight.
All I can say is that next time I put up a donation can for something, I will be coming in to check on it EVERY DAY. And I'm never putting one in my own town again.
Someone probably meant to temporarily move it to make room for something and then forgot they moved it. The next cashier at that counter probably didn't know it existed, since the previous cashier probably forgot about it. This probably continued through many cashiers, until you showed up and found it.
I understand it's frustrating, but I doubt someone deliberately moved it to a location where no one would easily find it because a tip jar was more important than a donation jar.
I agree that next time you should try to look in on the jar every day or 2. Because stuff like you mentioned happens. Maybe leave the container at a customer service counter, rather than a check-out counter. And, I don't know what the neighborhood is like where you are, but in my neighborhood, I'd be checking on it everyday just to empty the jar at the end of the day so I could know the money was safe. Leaving money laying around is not really a good idea here.
Better luck next time.
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The cops in my town are crazy. There's virtually no crime here. At all. That's part of why I expected a lot better. Yeah, it could have been a misunderstanding. But it's still incredibly annoying, to say the least.
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"What's God?"
"You know when you ask for something really hard? God's the guy who ignores you."
--- From The Island.