Most Canadians would be happy to find Sir Wilfrid Laurier sitting in their wallet. He might not be worth much, but, hey – five bucks is five bucks.
But to an American tourist returning home, a Canadian five-dollar bill is just a blue rectangle with a picture of some person staring at something.
Some might simply toss the unspendable cash in the trash. One man, however, decided to mail it to a person he’d never met in the Northwest Territories.
“Brian from Boston,” as he identified himself in a letter, said he had no plans on returning to Canada, and so decided he would mail it to a Canadian.
“But I don’t know anyone in Canada, so I decided to find a more remote place using Google Maps and see if I could find a name and an address,” he wrote.
And the lucky winner: Beth Jumbo, an administrative officer for the tiny village of Fort Simpson, N.W.T.
“It was a pleasant surprise and I immediately had to share this experience with my coworkers,” Jumbo told CTVNews.ca.
Jumbo, who said she was understandably confused upon receiving the strange piece of mail on Tuesday, shared a photo of the letter and bill to Facebook.
The bill – from the older Canadian Journey series of notes – appears to be tattered from being in Brian’s wallet for five years since his return from “really lovely” Quebec City.
Jumbo, a 29-year old who’s spent most of her life in Fort Simpson, says she plans on taking the windfall and reinvesting it in the village’s youth – by buying some lucky kid a swim pass at the local pool.
