What Would Jesus Do?

WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?

Or more importantly, what would YOU do?

     (Remember The Far Side cartoon where an alligator farm is located next to an airport skydiving school, and the caption reads "Trouble Brewing"? )
     I had an experience today at a Sutherlin grocery store that left me leaving, scratching my head. Had I done the right thing? Had I done the wrong thing? Did I say too much? Did I say too little?
     As I approached the check-out lines, all of the cash registers had apparently crashed. While the managers were running around trying to re-boot the computers and get the cash registers operating again, they decided to have the cashiers write down the amount of the customers' purchases, and refund the money manually from the till.
     I knew that trouble was a'brewing when I saw a young cashier in my check-out line. Today's youth don't receive the same training in personal finances that I had in high school. I still remember Mrs. Cannon teaching the semester-long "General Business" class my freshman year, and her teaching us how to count back change to a customer, and how to count up to the next nearest dollar. This was in our HEADS, not with the assistance of any machine, or even from writing it out in long-hand.
     I had two items totaling $6.72. I don't know if the devil made me do it, but I really wanted to get hack a $10 and a $5 bill in change, so I handed him $22.00 (a $20 and two $1) and said, "I hope this isn't going to be a problem."
     "Oh no, that's all right," came the reply, as the cashier scribbled down the amount of my purchase and deducted it from the $22.00 I had given him.
     "Here you go, $18.28 in change," he said.
     I politely replied that I thought he had given me too much money. Seven from twenty-two would make fifteen dollars, plus the loose change, so that was three dollars too much.
     The casher didn't automatically take my word for it. I didn't expect him to; I was probably still somewhat shifty-eyed from my recent ordeal with chemotherapy treatments. So, the casher once again "did the math" on paper, and tells me, "You're right. Here's $16.28 in change."
     In a split second, I pondered: Do I want to barter him down for the remaining one dollar that he's off? Or, do I go forward and say nothing? I chose to say nothing and graciously accepted the $16.28 for the following three reasons:
1. I didn't want to p*** off the customers behind me in line, by prolonging my transaction any longer than had already gone on. If anyone had overheard me, they knew I was a honest person, because I in good faith had attempted to show the cashier his error.
2. I didn't want to publicly embarrass or frustrate the cashier any more than had already taken place. I was afraid that if he "did the math" again on paper, he might end up giving me even MORE money back in change than he already had.
3. I reasoned that the cashier would not be reprimanded for being one dollar short in his drawer. (Did I just write something obscene?) Considering that all of the cash registers were temporarily down, I figured that the store's management wouldn't expect the amount of money in the drawers to necessarily match the amount of money that was being hurriedly written down on scratch paper.
     I left the store with a somewhat good feeling. I had "saved" one dollar a pound on the pound of meat that I had purchased....meat that was already way overpriced...$1.20 more per pound than what I would pay for it at a Roseburg grocery store!

     What would YOU have done?