u/LanternVex

So I recently won a bid on a banged up 2018 civic at a local salvage auction here in Ohio. The plan was to part it out or maybe fix it up if the frame wasnt completely shot. Yesterday I was ripping out the ruined backseat carpet to see how bad the rust was underneath, and I found a thick leather wallet wedged deep under the metal bracket of the seat frame. Like, you had to actually pull the metal apart to even spot it.

I opened it up expecting junk, but there is about $450 in cash, three different credit cards, and a drivers license belonging to some guy. The license expired back in 2023. There is also a library card and a couple of receipts from a grocery store dating around the same time. The car itself was marked as an insurance write-off after a heavy rear-end collision, which matches the damage I am looking at.

My immediate dumb instinct was to look up the guy on Facebook to just hand it back. I actually found a profile that looks exactly like the photo on the ID, and he still lives in the same general area. But then my brain kicked in and now I am paranoid.

If I contact this guy out of the blue saying "hey I have your old wallet and cash that I found inside a wrecked car I bought at an auction", is there a non-zero chance he accuses me of stealing it? Or worse, what if the car was involved in some legal mess or a hit and run before it hit the salvage yard and now I am inserting myself into a police investigation? The cash is sitting on my workbench right now and honestly it feels like a liability.

On the flip side, keeping the money feels wrong, and throwing away someone's personal stuff is just bad karma. If I take the wallet to the local police station and tell them I found it in an auction car, will they just take it and let me leave, or am I going to end up on some report? Has anyone dealt with finding personal effects in salvage vehicles before? What is the actual legal protocol here?

Location: Ohio, USA

I just spent roughly fourteen hours staring at a screen trying to figure out why my PID controller was behaving like a caffeinated toddler. Everything in the code looked solid. I triple checked the logic, ran simulations that came back perfect, and even rewrote the entire interrupt routine because I was convinced I had some kind of weird memory leak or timing jitter. I was at the point of questioning if I even understood basic control theory or if my three years in this program were just a massive fluke.

I was about to scrap the entire board and start over when I decided to test the physical connections one last time with a multimeter. Turns out, one of the cheap Chinese jumpers I used for the feedback loop had a break inside the insulation. To the naked eye, it looked perfectly fine, but internally it was doing absolutely nothing. Ten cents of plastic and copper basically held my entire weekend hostage and made me feel like an incompetent fraud.

It is honestly insulting how much power a defective piece of wire has over a complex system. You can have the most elegant algorithms and high end sensors, but it all falls apart because of a loose pin or a bad solder joint. I am currently sitting here staring at the blinking LED that finally shows the correct state, and I do not even feel happy about it. I just feel tired and a bit bitter that I wasted my Saturday on a hardware glitch that has nothing to do with my actual design.

This is the stuff they never emphasize in the lectures. They give you the math and the theory, but they do not mention that 90 percent of your professional frustration will probably come down to a loose connector or someone forgetting to ground a shield . I am going to bed before something else breaks.