A little while ago I was given a lift back to London by a friend. On the way back down the motorway we had one of those wide-ranging decisions that one can have – this one included the nature of trust, the likelihood of humans committing a crime if they knew nobody could see them and some complex relationship between star wars and popular rap albums.
My friend was far far too polite to accept fuel money at the time so when I was writing my thank you notes (which tend to go as postcards) I made the point of attached some money for fuel.
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This utterly confused all witnesses. The idea of attaching money to a postcard with a staple was apparently heresy. I had to have a number of conversations of the form
Them: you can’t do that
Me: why?
Them: because it will go missing!
Me: who will steal it?
Them: the postman!
Me: but he doesn’t steal the rest of my mail…
Them: how do you know?
So partly out of stubbornness I persisted with sending the letter – on the principle that I was willing to risk £10 to prove the innate trustworthiness of human beings in general and the honour of postmen in particular.
Several days later – I get the following photos by email:
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Success!
Here’s what I particularly love about this – when it reached the sorting office, someone clearly decided that the £10 was too much of a temptation, and so took the time to fetch and address by hand a new envelope – which strongly implies that the people at the Royal Mail are much more trustworthy than they even believe themselves to be :)
Yay for humans!
