Spell-bound

It pays to be honest.

A homeless man in Amsterdam found a wallet containing 2,000 euro at a train station while looking for empty plastic bottles to exchange for cash. As usual, 33-year-old Hadjer Al-Ali turned it over to the police, who rewarded him with a gift voucher worth 50 euro for his honesty.

People learned of Ali’s good deed and started making cash donations that reached 3,550 euro. One person launched an online fund drive and another offered him a job. The fundraiser raised 34,102 euro in just one day, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

“I want to thank everyone so, so, so much... I can’t describe how I’m feeling at the moment... I’ve been inundated by people saying the sweetest, nicest, things,” the father of two, who has been sleeping on the streets for 18 months, said in a video post on Instagram, according to AFP.

Ali said he could now rebuild his life with the money, starting with living in a rental home.

Another kind of “honesty,” however, raised a teacher’s eyebrows, according to a Reddit post.

It was the first day of school and the teacher was going over the roll of her pupils’ names. As she called out, “oh-NEST-ee,” a girl from the back of the room said, “It’s Honesty.”

In the anonymous teacher’s post, she said she stopped herself from apologizing.

“I realized it could be interpreted as ‘I’m sorry for the ridiculous name your parents gave you.’ Instead, I smiled, thanked her, and moved on,” she said, according to The Daily Record (TDR).

TDR quoted another Reddit user who commented, “There was a student at my school also named Honesty but spelled it Ah’Nesty.”

Another, reports TDR, commented, “I agree — what a terrible name. Just give your kids normal names.”