Yesterday I received a $500 award for excellence at work. It's the second one I've received in the last 2 months. It feels pretty good to be recognized, even better to get 500 bucks for doing nothing more than what I consider to be my job. The first award came in the form of AMEX gift checks. I got 5 checks for a 100 bucks each. For the one yesterday, i got an AMEX gift card. It came with all this literature and instructions on how to check your balance online and all this stuff. I was curious to see how it worked, so I went online to check the balance only to discover that the balance was not $500 bucks, but $494.05. Odd, huh?

When I was reading through the literature that came with the card, I saw it listed all these fees. There's a 2 dollar a month maintenance fee (waived for the first 12 months) and a $5.95 fee for a lost or stolen card. $5.95. Interesting. That's the exact amount missing from my card. Sure enough I checked the account history and back in October there was a charge for $5.95 for a lost or stolen card. This card had history that went back to June. Very strange. It's almost as if it was purchased for someone else, never given out for some reason, and then I become the lucky recipient, but only after it was lost or stolen.

Now the conundrum comes from what to do. Should I say something to the person who it gave to me? We short of have a funny relationship as it is and I thought it was weird that I got the award from her in the first place. Do I tell her what happened? Do I make a joke of it? Hey, you didn't buy lunch with the card before you gave it to me, did you? Or do I do nothing and just take my $494.05 and spend it frivolously? What would you do?