I would like to think that if I won a life-changing amount of money in the lottery, or suddenly became the world’s richest man I would be the same person now as I would be then.
However, we know that money changes people. Just look at anyone who gets a sudden amount of money they weren’t expecting and see how they act.
For example, I once won about sixty thousand dollars in a state lottery. It certainly was not enough to live off of for the rest of my life, but it did help in making things easier.
I remember the day that they told me the money would be wired into my bank account.
I looked at the online statement, then called to check my balance over the phone, and even went to an ATM to do a balance check there.
Sometimes, going from having a certain amount of money to suddenly seeing that you have way more than you might need can be a shock to the senses.
Take the case of a man from Pennsylvania named Chris Reynolds. Chris is your average guy, with a side hobby/hustle of selling vintage BMW tires on eBay.
Now, he does a good portion of these transactions through PayPal.
He opened up his computer and logged into PayPal to check the status of a transaction he was expecting so he could ship out some tires. Instead of seeing the $140 he was expecting to see, he saw a much different number.
PayPal’s website was telling him that his balance was $92,233,720,368,547,800. That friends, would have made him the world’s richest man surpassing everyone that we think of as the world’s richest people.
So, he did what any smart person would do before he touched one dime of the money. He called to confirm the amount.
His suspicions that there was no way that this could have been a real transaction were proven correct. Somehow, and I can’t believe something like this can happen, that ridiculously high amount was attributed to a display glitch.
Now, I don’t know if I would have handled it the way that he did when he found out that the was the world’s richest man, and then lost the money again within ten minutes, but the good humor he had with the whole situation is an attitude more people should definitely have.
