Many of you have probably experienced that sinking feeling when you realize that you’ve lost your wallet, a phone, or perhaps even worse, a laptop.

If you’re lucky, a kind stranger returns your belongings to you intact, at which point you offer profuse thanks. But you may want to do something more and provide some sort of reward. At the very least, this person saved you precious time — now, there’s no need to wait in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles to get another driver’s license or call your health insurer to replace your identification cards. The stranger may have even returned a pile of cash, or a computer that contains irreplaceable artifacts from your life.

So what’s the right thing to do?

Lizzie Post, an etiquette expert, co-author of the 18th edition of “Emily Post’s Etiquette,” and a great-great-granddaughter of Emily Post, said there were no easy answers. Many people have their own beliefs about reward systems. “It is such a personal thing,” she said. “For some people, a ‘thank you’ is all they will need” because they would want someone to do the same for them.

Still, she’s not opposed to doing something more. “It’s really up to you about what kind of acknowledgment you want to make,” she said. “Cash rewards are great when you can provide them.”

If it’s an employee of an organization, say an airline, who returned your belongings, she said you may make the effort to call that person’s supervisor and heap on the praise.

A while back, my wallet mysteriously disappeared somewhere between the coffee cart outside my building and my desk on the second floor. The next day, a young man located me and said he’d found my wallet inside the subway station next to the coffee cart. If memory serves, he said he was going to the movies that night, so I went to pick up my wallet before he left. Then, I stuffed enough money into his hands — which he tried to refuse — to pay for his movie tickets. I felt it was the least I could do.

Have any of you given a reward to someone who returned your belongings? What do you think is the appropriate thing to do?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=41ec7d60eab6e8f7cf0742c93686be12