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Uber driver saves Christmas by returning $8,000 cash a 16-year-old left in his car

Esbon Kamau is a hero.

via Thibault Penin/Unsplash

Uber driver returns $8,000 left in his car.

When you’re a rideshare driver, passengers leave a lot of things in your back seat. According to Uber, the most common items left in vehicles in 2023 were clothing, phones, backpacks and purses, wallets, headphones, jewelry, keys, books, laptops and watches.

The strangest things left in Ubers in 2023 were a Danny DeVito Christmas ornament, a toy poodle and a fog machine. The rideshare company also notes that the most forgetful cities in the United States are Jacksonville, Florida; San Antonio, Texas; Palm Springs, California; Houston, Texas and Salt Lake City, Utah.

As reported by WVTM13, Esbon Kamau, an Uber driver in Alabama and father of 5, may have seen the most eye-popping thing left in a car in 2023: $8,000 cash. How he handled it has to make him one of America's most honest Uber drivers.

'Do something good:' Uber driver returns $8,000 Christmas gift to Hoover teen.

It all started when Kamau took Alex Tisdale, 16, on a 15-minute ride to John Hawkins Parkway in Hoover, Alabama. The two had a nice discussion that Kamau remembered because of the way Tisldale talked about his father. “He told me how his dad is proud of him and how he’s also very proud of him. And he said something which makes me feel very good,” Kamau told WVTM13.

After Kamau dropped off Tisdale, he immediately had another ride and noticed a red, Christmas-themed bag in the backseat. “I realized there's something at the back of my seat. And I picked it up immediately. And when I checked, I saw this a lot of money, quite a lot, to be honest,” Kamau said.

At the same time, Tisdale was retracing his steps, trying to remember where he had left the bag of money that his father had given him to buy a motorcycle. “I was pacing around the parking lot just thinking, where? Where could I put it? Where would it be?" Tisdale said.

Both contacted Uber about the missing backpack, and the company connected them to organize a drop-off. Without hesitation, Kamau drove to Tisdale’s location to give him his bag full of money.

"I was relieved and so surprised he actually came back because that was a very, very nice thing of him to do. Actually, tipped him $10 for that,” Tisdale said.

Kamau wants his admirable display of honesty to be a lesson for Uber drivers everywhere. “When you do something good, OK, it comes back 10 times," he said.

Kamau’s good deed is another beautiful reminder that personal integrity and kindness are worth a lot more than money. It’s also a wonderful reminder that in a world where bad news gets all of the headlines, there are still a lot of everyday heroes out there doing the right thing.

This is a touching story, but don’t let this Uber driver’s honesty give you a sense of complacency next time you’re riding in an Uber. If you leave something in the backseat, the rideshare company will charge you a $20 fee to have it returned.

From Your Site Articles

kindness

Joy

Kind thrift store worker finds $5,000 in a donation bag, tracks down the owner to return it

Now, that's a Good Samaritan.

via Angelslover/Pixabay

Clothes on a rack at a thrift store.

Thrift stores are an excellent place for shoppers to get a deal and, occasionally, find something extremely rare that’s worth a lot of money. CBS News reports that the owner of Pick of the Litter thrift store in Burlingame, California, just outside of San Francisco, came across an extraordinary discovery in a bag of donated clothes and did the right thing by giving it back.

Pick of the Litter is a thrift store that sells various second-hand items, including clothes, household items, art, jewelry and watches, books, records and musical instruments.

Oliver Jolis, Pick of the Litter’s owner, was organizing a bag of donated clothes when something unexpected happened. "Money just started falling out," Jolis told CBS News. "It kept falling and falling. I was like, 'This is a decent amount of money here.’”

When Jolis counted up the cash, it came to $5,000. The donor must have put the money in with the clothes for safekeeping and then forgotten.

But instead of pocketing the cash or splitting it with his coworkers, Jolis and the other folks at the thrift store got to work trying to find the person who mistakenly donated the money.

Luckily, they left a clue to their identity in the bag of donated clothes.

Jolis found an old scrap of paper in the bag with car insurance information. The information was enough to track down the person who donated the bag of clothing. They realized it was a woman who regularly donates to the store. The woman told CBS News that she prefers to remain anonymous.

The thrift store staff reached out to her and asked a series of questions to be sure she was the person who dropped off the bag. She passed the test with flying colors.

"I said come on down I've got something for you. She came back, and I gave her $5,000 in a paper bag and said, 'Thank you for supporting us,'" Jolis said. "He could have just put the money in his pocket. Nobody would have known. But he didn't," said the woman who donated the clothes.

CBS News says that Jolis’ display of kindness is par for the course at the thrift shop, where all proceeds go to the Peninsula Humane Society.

These days, shelter pets in the Bay Area need all the help they can get. The recent moratorium on evictions, mixed with a shaky economy, has forced many to surrender their pets to local shelters. A recent heatwave in the Bay made things even worse. Many dogs that belong to unhoused people suffered burned feet and paws after walking on the hot asphalt and concrete and were surrendered to shelters for treatment.

For Jolis, doing the right thing and returning the money to the woman who accidentally donated it was easy. It was just a case of giving back to someone who had given so much to Pick of the Litter.

"We're grateful for all the donations we get, so it was a win-win," said Jolis.

From Your Site Articles

kindness

Joy

Selfless Home Depot employees came together to find a man who lost $700 on aisle 22

Incredible honesty.

via Mike Mozart/Flickr

A Home Depot store in Newington, Connecticut.

One of Home Depot’s core values is "doing the right thing." The company explains it as exercising "good judgment by ‘doing the right thing’ instead of just ‘doing things right.’ We strive to understand the impact of our decisions, and we accept responsibility for our actions.”

The value is so important that it is written on all of its employees' work vests.

There’s no better example of employees following the company’s values than an incident that happened late last month at a Home Depot store in Bellevue, Tennessee. This story was originally reported by WSMV in Nashville, Tennessee, and we thought it was such a good deed that we wanted to share it far and wide through our Upworthy audience.

via Jake Slagle/Flickr

Home Depot employee Adam Adkisson was walking down aisle 22, where you can find insulation and ladders, when he noticed a small envelope. “I didn’t think anything of it at first. I thought it was empty, but I thought I’d go back to make sure and when I picked it up, I could feel that It had stuff in it. It had money,” Adkisson told WSMV.

When he opened the envelope, he realized it was stuffed with $700 cash.

Adkisson did the right thing and turned the envelope in to a manager. At the end of the day, the closing manager, Alissa Rocchi, noticed that no one had come by to claim the missing money. So she took to Facebook and posted about the missing envelope, leaving out key details that would have to be filled in by the owner to prove it was theirs.

She could have just left it in the safe at work and gone on with her life, but she went out of her way to find the person who lost the money. That’s definitely “doing the right thing.”

Luckily, the Facebook post caught the attention of the owner’s partner, who reached out to her via messenger.

“I got a message from a gentleman by the name of Mark who said that’s my partner’s. It’s his money. He lost it. He is panicking,” Rocchi said. He was able to identify the envelope by describing some important details that were scrawled on the back.

“I was stressing over it pretty bad. So, I am glad that he is a social media guy and was able to see that because I would have never seen it,” Johnathon Clayton, the owner of the lost envelope, said. It’s important that he got it back because he was planning on using the money to buy Christmas gifts for his kids.

After getting his money back, Clayton went to the store and personally thanked Adkisson for his good deed and gave him a small reward. Adkisson should sleep well knowing that his good deed meant that Clayton’s children will have a merrier Christmas.

Rocchi says that it’s all part of the company’s core values to “do the right thing.”

“Our core value is on our chest and one of our core values says to do the right thing. That is just us living our core values,” Rocchi said.

From Your Site Articles

good deeds

lost money

Uber driver saves Christmas by returning $8,000 cash a 16-year-old left in his car

Esbon Kamau is a hero.

'Do something good:' Uber driver returns $8,000 Christmas gift to Hoover teen.

Kind thrift store worker finds $5,000 in a donation bag, tracks down the owner to return it

Now, that's a Good Samaritan.

Selfless Home Depot employees came together to find a man who lost $700 on aisle 22

Incredible honesty.

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