Is There a Plausible Explanation?

Originally posted on August 2011, when my then 

teen-age daughter purchased her first car.

My daughter recently bought a new car. The price she had to pay for the car was $1800.00. She went to her bank and asked the cashier for this amount in a cashier’s check, which the lady immediately made out and my daughter cashed on the spot in order to pay this man in cash. The cashier counted out the money into my daughter’s hand.

My daughter immediately took this money to the car dealer and paid him for the car, counting out $1800.00 cash to this man. Three people witnessed this event: my daughter, the car dealer, and my daughter’s friend Anna. The dealer handed over the keys to the new car, and the deal was done.

Several days later, my daughter gets her bank statements in the mail. It was off. It was off by $1000.00 in her favor. She had one thousand dollars more in her account than she should have had. Looking at the statement, we saw that the cashier’s check which was written out to pay for the car was made out as $800.00, not $1800.00.

We went to the bank today to straighten out this error. The bank employee was extremely puzzled and, quite frankly, a little more than amazed.

The facts were ~

• 1. The cashier’s check was, indeed, made out for $800.00 instead of $1800.00. We assumed that the cashier, chatting away with my daughter, had made a mistake in writing out the amount on the check, but she had obviously counted out the right amount of cash into my daughter’s hand.

• 2. The cashier’s till-box count and records for that day would have shown an error if she had written a cashier’s check for $800.00, and then handed out $1800.00 in cash. However, the cashier’s till-box count and records for that day were all correct– showing that an $800.00 check had been written, and $800.00 had been given to the recipient (my daughter).

• 3. My daughter swore that the cashier had counted out $1800.00 into her hand, and then she had immediately recounted it in front of the lady. However, when the bank reviewed the video tape of this transaction, it was evident that the cashier had only counted out $800.00.

No one knows what to think, and no one has a logical explanation for what happened. What makes it so odd is that my daughter obviously had the correct amount on her for the car ($1800.00), because the car dealer would not have handed the car over to her if she had not paid the correct amount.

So, where did the $1000.00 come from?

The bank employee’s explanation…Money Fairies.