One time when I was in college and had practically no money, I checked my bank account one day and discovered that I had approximately $500 that had no business being there. I knew that it couldn’t be my money, but I loved the idea of having that free money, so despite all of the horrible urges to do something crazy like buy groceries, I waited to see if the bank realized the error and took the money away. It never happened, and for a few days I lived like a really poor king.
But that “Cool story, bro” doesn’t hold a candle to a Pennsylvania man who received his monthly PayPal balance email only to see that he had been erroneously awarded $92 quadrillion. Or what I like to call one hell of a trip to the strip club.
Delaware County resident Chris Reynolds received just such a shocking delivery from PayPal on Friday, when he opened his monthly statement from the online money-transfer company via email and saw that his ending balance was $92,233,720,368,547,800.
“I’m just feeling like a million bucks,” Reynolds told the Daily News yesterday. “At first I thought that I owed quadrillions. It was quite a big surprise.” (Via Philly.com)
Unfortunately for Reynolds, when he logged in to check his PayPal balance online and see if the company accidentally made him richer than any man in history by giving him more money than has ever actually existed, he found that his account balance was back to zero. Still, like any of us, Reynolds at least jokingly thought about what he would have done if he’d been given $92 quadrillion and he claimed he’d be pretty generous with it.
“I was moved to be really generous by good fortune,” said the father of three.
If the prodigious account credit were true, Reynolds – who with his wife owns Reynolds Ink, a public-relations firm – said he’d pay down debts with the money.
“I’m a very responsible guy,” he said. “I would pay the national debt down first. Then I would buy the Phillies, if I could get a great price.”
The Phillies? I’d buy the St. Louis Cardinals, but that’s only because I’m generally considered a classier and more intelligent baseball fan and quadrillionaire than others. But I do know what I’d look like if I received that kind of coin…