Honesty Pays

For the most part, I've always been an honest person. I am never brutally honest to people; generally I keep my mouth shut if something is going to hurt someone's feelings. I rarely lie and I don't take advantage of others. One of my responsibilities this year is keeping up with money and budgets within the speech department and team. I've always made sure that I return extra money leftover at tournaments and always write a receipt for money I've received. It drove me crazy when I discovered that I was $10 off with our stock-in-talk fundraiser. I worked for two hours going through receipts and matching them to the my excel file until I finally found the discrepancy.

Earlier this year, I received some prose and poetry books to review. If I wanted to keep them, I was to send a check to the company and the books were mine. If not, I could send them back. In addition to the books, they sent along a DVD that was free if I paid by a certain date. If you know me, you know that I didn't really do anything until well after that date. I finally decided to keep the books because they had several potential pieces for my students and so I had a check cut to send them. I sent back the DVD that I didn't even get a chance to view (it ended up in one of my piles) because I had missed the deadline. Today, I got the DVD back in the mail. With it was a thank you card that had the following message written:

• While wrapping up this year's record keeing responsibilities I noticed something interesting. You placed an order for two books, Prose To Be Read Aloud and Poetry To Be Read Aloud, but sent back the DVD. Your order form and handwritten note is enclosed. You are the only person who did this! Others simply paid for the books after the review time was passed without sending the DVD. Thank you for your honesty and integrity. Please accept the DVD enclosed as a gift for me.

How cool is that?