I found a twenty dollar bill on the street yesterday. The episode felt like a hidden camera sociology experiment. It was on 5th Avenue near 59th Street, in the middle of a weekday. Very crowded with tourists.

I saw the $20 bill sitting on the sidewalk, and I stopped walking to assess the situation.

Was anyone else around looking for the twenty dollar bill they just dropped? No.

Was this a set-up or a trap of some sort? Didn’t seem so.

Was there fishing line attached to the bill? Hah. No, it did not appear to be a grown-up version of a trick you’d play on a grade school substitute teacher.

In the few seconds it took for this thought process to transpire I saw at least two people walk past and look directly at the money without stopping to pick it up, and without even giving the slightest pause.

There was no mistaking it. The bill was not wadded up or obscured. It was folded in half but anybody could see a twenty dollar bill sitting there for the taking. So why did those people see it without pausing to even acknowledge it?

Maybe it’s because I had already stopped, making it appear I had dropped the money and was waiting for the crowd to clear before picking it up. That was my first instinct, after all — to look around for someone who might have dropped the money. Maybe that’s what the others did, and on seeing me they felt that picking it up could lead to an altercation.

After a few seconds I bent over and picked it up. In case I was on camera, or in case someone somewhere had reason to question my action, I grimaced a bit in a “finders keepers” way.

I was reminded of an incident that happened last year. Walking through a very crowded Rockefeller Center, a tall man pushed into me, deliberately taking a pair of glasses out of his pocket and throwing them to the ground. Very poorly acted, he tried to make it look like I ran into him and broke his glasses. His goal, obvious from the start, was for me to give him money for new glasses.

The glasses were already damaged before he threw them to the ground. Even if I had not noticed this I think the mutilated condition of the glasses would have tipped me off. They could not have been that badly damaged for having fallen such a short distance. And his clumsy attempt to make it look like I ran into him was a complete failure. Who falls for this shit, I wondered.

My instinct was to say “Nice try,” but instead I fakely apologized and kept walking. He followed me for a half a block, running into people in a well-rehearsed attempt to bring scornful attention to me. Through the crowd he yelled “That guy broke my glasses! Sir, you broke my glasses, what am I gonna do?”

No one seemed to buy his cunard and he came nearer to me, tapping my shoulder. I can’t remember his words but he implied that he couldn’t afford new glasses (neither can I, pal — but I didn’t say that). I repeated “It was an accident, I’m sorry.” He acted thunderstruck at my apparent callousness, splaying his fingers against his chest and grunting “Aaaaw!” He was trying to make me feel like a heartless brut.

I escaped into the post office and he did not follow me into the building. I have since seen this same person working Rockefeller Center with a pair of destroyed eyeglasses in his shirt pocket, looking for people to scam.