My friend was an art teacher at a public high school in Boston. She had just been assigned to teach a video photography class, but no funding was available to buy equipment. She did what many public school teachers did—spent her own money to buy the needed equipment.
On a Saturday morning, she entered a warehouse store and picked out a camera the entire class of kids would share. It was a consumer-grade video camera costing 200 dollars. She paid for the camera at the register and headed to the back of the store, where the merchandise was pulled from the warehouse and handed to customers.
About five minutes later, a blue tub rolled down the conveyor, and a worker called her name. Her package was ready. The blue bin was rolled over to her, and she reached into it to pick up the camera box. She thought something looked odd about the brown box because it was larger than she expected, but the sticker on the outside had the correct catalog number, so she stuck it under her arm, walked out to her car, and drove home.
She got busy preparing lunch for her children and didn’t think again about the box until later that evening. After opening it up, she realized she had been given the wrong camera. She was holding a professional video camera instead of the one costing 200 dollars. She called a friend who worked in video production, and her friend told her the camera was worth just short of $25,000. She thought about it for a while and decided to do what she thought was right. She sold the $25,000 camera and used the money to buy video cameras and accessories for her students. She used the equipment in her classroom until she retired three years later and passed it along to the teacher who took her place.
