Off topic: What's the most expensive stuff you've ever been entrusted with?

[+Verboten]

Every once in a while I get a call to do some courier work. Something I picked up during a period of unemployment last year, and hung on to since it's very infrequent. It's nice to grab some extra cash for a few hours of driving every once in a while.

 

I deliver to Canada, so I need to have a commercial invoice which states value of goods. Usually it's a few hundred dollars or so. Last night I delivered a shipment with a stated value of over $100,000.

 

It's not like I'm Don Johnson carrying 8 bil in notes across Europe or anything, but it's definitely the most valuable load I've ever hauled. I figure the cargo was worth about 30 times as much as my car. Hah!

 

Anyway, this isn't a terribly interesting story, but I bet there are some better ones out there. What's the most expensive stuff you ever had possession of that belonged to someone else?

 

-Vb

[+Dawgies]

I was working for a police department and had the morning duty of escorting this nice lady down an alley two blocks from the main bank to the drive thru. I carried the case. Common sense told me it was cash. I was never really concerned about how much. It was a small town! One morning I asked her and she very calmly told me it was the opening cash of $ 250.000.00.

 

For a moment there.....only for a moment....

 

~ Honest Value Never Fails ~

[+Jamie Z]

As a casino dealer, there have been a handful of times I've been manning a table with somewhere close to a million dollars. Probably around $700,000-$800,000. Of course, I'm not actually in possession of the money, since I'm inside their building...

 

My next most is some guys wallet at school. Not that it had a lot of cash, but in the morning, the guy came up to me and asked if I would hold onto it for him, since he was wearing shorts without pockets. He told me I was the only one in school he'd trust. I thought that was pretty cool.

 

Jamie

[+Desert_Warrior]

Simple. My final duty assignment in the army was as the shop foreman of an 80 man General Support maintenance shop. I was personally accountable for over $80 million in electronics maintenance systems for an entire guided missile air defense system. I was also responsible for the health and welfare of the men. They were priceless.

 

The funny thing is, now I am not responsible for squat, no tools, no people. I work 1/2 the hours, I get 3 times the pay, and I don't need to leap out of aircraft or get shot at to collect my pay.

 

First they give me a power plant to play with. Then they send a bunch of great guys to play with me. Then every two weeks they put more money in my bank account!

 

Life just doesn't get better than this !!!

 

Mike. Desert_Warrior (aka KD9KC).

El Paso, Texas.

 

Citizens of this land may own guns. Not to threaten their neighbors, but to ensure themselves of liberty and freedom.

 

They are not assault weapons anymore... they are HOMELAND DEFENSE WEAPONS!

[+TMAN264]

Some dude at the horse track asked me to cash in his winning ticket, since I was going that way because I won a $2 place bet. His ticket cashed out at $540. I had never met the guy, he was just sharing a table with me and my friends. It's not the amount that is impressive, it's the fact he just gave me $540 to carry back to him, and he didn't know me from any one. Trust is a interesting situation.

 

Make a sanity check.

[Blackshoe]

The military is unique in how it "entrusts" people at a young age with (in my case) nuclear reactors, high explosives, fully automatic weapons, the lives of others, etc.

 

As far as actual possession...On several occasions it was my duty to courier missiles and 5-inch gun rounds in a small boat between Seal Beach and Long Beach. The missiles can go about 1.3 mil depending on "payload".

 

SVT + GPS = fast cache

[Aladin Sane]

I once did some work for NASA. I was entrusted with 10 grams of lunar soil to be consumed during the final experiment of a research project. This may not sound like much, but when you consider the billions we spent to bring a few hundred pounds of lunar material back to the earth, it was pretty pricey dust.

[+Matt1344]

I've been entrusted with some priceless truths that have evaded man for thousands of years. Does that count?

[+Verboten]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Matt1344:

I've been entrusted with some priceless truths that have evaded man for thousands of years. Does that count?

---

It counts for best laugh of the day before noon.

 

I didn't want to omit stuff like guys flying $16 mil coptors, because that's relevant. As is the lunar soil by Aladin.

 

Really though, I like the human stories by Dawgies, TMAN264 and Jamie Z. But keep telling anything relevant. Keep spillin' the beans,

 

-Vb

[dsandbro]

Back in the days when I was a fire crew captain for the Forest Service I would frequently be the first on the scene of a reported fire. With my verbal request over the radio I could initiate the movement of aircraft, crews, and equipment costing the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars (and affecting millions of dollars of resource and property values) without any manager or bean counter questioning my judgement of what was needed. God help you if you were wrong, though.

 

When I got back to the station I needed two signatures on a purchase authorization to buy a can of paint from the hardware store. The contrast between the two events was always good for a laugh.

 

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"The time has come" the Walrus said "to speak of many things; of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and Kings".

[iryshe]

The title says it all. Closing this thread (Off-Topic)

 

Jeremy Irish

Groundspeak - The Language of Location™