My partner lives in a condo busy enough and on a floor low enough to justify taking the stairs most of the time. At the bottom of the stairwell, I've begun to notice a lone penny.
One singular cent.
Alone, near worthless.
One might even call it worth less than the monetary value of the copper if the penny were to be melted down.
Since its first appearance, this penny has been in the same spot, on the same step, completely undisturbed. It must have been just sitting there for weeks now. The stairwell is not that big. It's impossible to miss.
I'm definitely not the only person who takes the stairs in this building; Someone had to have dropped their penny there before. Despite evidence of foot traffic in the area, none have stooped to procure it- yet all have most certainly thought the same thing: "my time is worth more than the penny and expending time to pick it up is a net loss." In all likelihood even the originator of the lost penny passed it by and thought the exact same thing about their own penny!
Of course, "how much money does there have to be on the ground before you decide it's worth the effort to pick it up" is hardly an original thought... but what if it wasn't just a thought experiment? What if this could just be an actual experiment? What if you could glean insights into the inner machinations of your fellow building occupants?
Imagine that you are a stair enjoyer and you take the stairs every day and see the same penny. Now imagine that one day, there are now two pennies. Isn't that kind of weird? So strange it'd almost make you do a double-take*. Not only did someone not pick up the penny, this copper caper made a concerted effort to place another one there.
* Hopefully you don't actually double-take while moving up-and-down stairs for your own safety
As part of the experiment, you can be:
- A casual observer, checking into the stairwell often to see if the amount of pennies changes
- An active participant, changing the amount of pennies in the pot
Past a certain point, you have to partake in some way; Disruption is inevitable given the limited space of a modern condo stairwell. There will come a point that either there will be so much money that it's worth picking up, or there will be so many pennies in one spot that it prevents safe passage along the stairs. And even further beyond that, there will be a point where there can be so many pennies that it turns the stairwell into a copper slide.
How far can this go? To paraphrase J. Robert Oppenheimer from the hit film Oppenheimer, "I don't know, but I assure you if you do the math, you will go where no one else has before".
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