It’s amazing how deeply simple acts of decency can impact a person. A small gesture of kindness has the ability to overwhelm a you in a big way. Such an example is when Ford mechanic Richard Guilford got a message from a stranger on Facebook saying that the wallet he lost eleven years ago was found in the most bizarre place.
Minnesota mechanic Chad Volk was trying to snap a filter box back into place after replacing the cooling fans on a 2015 Ford Edge that had 151,000 miles on it. Volk looked to see what the problem was and he found the culprit: a wallet that was sandwiched between the air filter box and the transmission.
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“I messed around a little bit and then pulled it back out and the wallet was sitting on a little ledge where it needed to snap down,” said Volk to CBS News. “I pulled the wallet out and that's what it was."
Upon seeing the wallet, Chad opened it to see what was inside, finding it stuffed with $15, Cabela gift cards worth $250, a $25 gift card to Outback Steakhouse, and now-expired lottery tickets. He put those back into the wallet and looked for the important stuff: the driver’s license and the Ford work ID that identified the wallet’s owner, Richard Guilford.
With the ID picture and name, Volk did some detective work on Facebook. He found Guilford and sent him a private message letting him know that the Michigan resident’s wallet was found in the engine bay of a car in Minneapolis. Guilford was dumbstruck.
@kare11news A mechanic from Lake Crystal, MN found a wallet under the hood of an 11-year-old Ford. Puzzled, Chad Volk looked inside. He found the work ID of the Michigan autoworker who lost it at the Ford plant. Thanks to an honest mechanic, after 11 years he has his wallet back. #land10kstories
In 2014, Guilford was doing some electrical work on some Ford Edges before they were sent to the dealerships. It was then that his wallet, a Christmas gift from his sons, apparently slipped out of his front pocket into the car. He and his coworkers searched 20 to 30 cars after he discovered the wallet was missing, but they checked the floors, doors, and under the seats of the vehicles, never thinking that it would be in one of the engine bays. After searching with no luck, he considered it a lost cause. That is, until Volk reached out.
After finding and confirming that the wallet was Guilford’s, Volk went to the post office and mailed the wallet, refusing an award. “Just the way I was raised,” Volk told KARE NBC 11 News.
Guilford got not just his wallet back, but everything within it intact including the $275 in Cabela’s gift cards that he was intending on using as Christmas gifts for his family (which are still good, he says). He was surprised at how durable the wallet was to keep everything inside in good condition after so many years next to a hot engine for over a 151,000 miles, but was more surprised and touched at Volk’s kind gesture.
"It restores your faith in humanity that people will say, 'Hey, you lost this, I found this, I'm going to get it back to you,'" Guilford told Inside Edition. Guilford says he’s going to keep everything in the wallet as-is and keep it in his China cabinet as a conversation starter to share the story about how his lost wallet came back to him over a decade later.
While kindness like Volk’s seems rare, fortunately for humanity it’s more common than one would typically think. A 2019 study titled “Civic honesty around the globe” had researchers planted 17,000 wallets in public places in cities throughout the world. Each one of the wallets contained a grocery list, business cards with a common male name, and a key. However, to shake things up, some of the wallets contained various amounts of cash while others didn’t have any currency at all.
One would assume that the wallets that had money were less likely to be reported lost, but quite the opposite. The results found that 51% of the wallets with cash in them were returned compared to the 40% of the cashless wallets that were returned. Switzerland had the highest overall reporting rate while China lagged behind in last place. While altruism is a reason why the majority of the cash-filled wallets were returned, one of the study’s authors said that a person’s desire to be seen as honest is equally a factor.
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"We went in thinking that people were going to be less likely to return these wallets," said David Tannenbaum, one of the study’s researchers, to USA Today. "Much to our surprise when the research came back, it had done the exact opposite – people were more likely to return the wallet when it had money in it. We couldn't believe it."
These researchers are right in that reporting and returning a lost wallet isn’t purely altruistic. Scientifically, good deeds like that benefit the people making them, too. Doctors, psychologists, and experts say that doing a good deed like returning a wallet has your brain reward you with feel-good chemicals such as oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine. This can help a person’s cardiovascular system, reduce stress, and do more for one's health. There are even those who argue that just watching or reading about a good deed can provide similar benefits. Some of you reading this article might have clicked on this because you knew it would make you feel good today.
Whatever the reasoning, whether it’s because it’s a prosocial act for society, altruism, or to make yourself feel good or appear better, doing acts of kindness such as what Volk did for Guilford improves the lives of everyone. A small act such as a Facebook search and a small cost such as paying postage from Minnesota to Michigan can create powerful connections.
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