I'm Not Going to Hell for 35 Cents

Reading Peter Leppik’s excellent entry on the stock option backdating scandal reminded me of a conversation with a friend. We were talking how we’re both saps because we return excess change when cashiers make mistakes. Her quote on the matter, which has stayed with me for years: “I’m not going to Hell for 35 cents.”

The idea, of course, if you’re going walk down that dark route, you should do it for lots of money, not a little.

Whenever I catch and correct the little mistakes in my favor, I think of that quote. It’s like a mantra. Last week I rode the train to and from downtown Chicago. On the way in, a conductor didn’t came through to punch my ten-ride pass. On the way back, I told the conductor to punch my card twice to make up for it.

This is ridiculous. I’ve never seen anyone else do this. Metra doesn’t expect it — it seems their policy is if you don’t get asked for the fare, then it’s your lucky day and you get a free ride. It certainly makes no difference to Metra, and is financially detrimental to me. I can’t even claim this keeps me out of Hell, since I don’t believe in it. Better yet, with my liberal arts education, I can do a great job of invoking cultural relativism, microeconomics and other academic societal-logical tools to make an iron-clad case that I could convince myself to believe.

Instead, my claim is that these little incidents are ethical exercise. You do them for yourself, not for the supposed (tiny) benefit of an incorrect transaction in your favor. Each incident is small, but like working out, it builds up. Hopefully gives you the fortitude to handle the big ones.

But that’s the low-end. Would she “go to Hell for 3.5 million dollars”?

Probably not.

The nice thing about the big wrongs is they’re, well, big. Terribly obvious. In my experience, the big wrongs are easier to handle than the multitudes of sniping little guys. Amusingly, I wavered over that double-punch last week than I did the last multi-thousand dollar contract I walked away from (I won’t go into details, suffice to say they violated their public privacy policy). The scenario was so black-and-white, it was scarcely even a conscious decision.

Turning back to Peter’s entry:

And here in Minnesota, we have our hometown hero William McGuire of United Health Group, who is also embroiled in this fiasco. I don’t know him personally, but the man is worth well over a billion dollars and has a squeaky-clean reputation.

I find this puzzling. For the sake of discussion, assume McGuire is guilty. Why would he do it? At once, this crime is small and large. It’s small to him (he’s already loaded and doesn’t need the funds), yet large to everyone else. Is it the thrill? A Dostoevsky-style proving of his superman-status with the “perfect crime”? I really don’t know, those are just guesses.

Update: Daniel Jalkut has cured himself of the disability.

Monday, May 22, 2006
12:00 AM