$500,000
I once worked on a project in a pre-dominantly African American section of Miami, Florida, that required paying quite a large number of workers, to the tune of $100 each worker, in one single day. (That's about 5,000 people, give or take a few hundred for surprises.) As the payroll person where I'd worked, I had no problem handling accounts in the six-digit range, but I wasn't quite prepared for what upper management had planned for us at the last minute: instead of writing checks, the perfectly sane way of going about this, we would be lining up our workers at the end of the day and handing out thousands of envelopes with 100-dollar bills in each of them... In the Miami ghetto. I'm sure the idea made sense to them for some reason unbeknownst to me. To me though, the order came down like a death sentence.

Two days later I was sitting in my "secure location"... my kitchen... with half a million fresh-scented, milky-green U.S. dollars in $100 and $20 denominations in my lap. The money, when stacked, filled two milk crates, but all we could find to keep it in was beat up cardboard boxes. It was right after noon on a hot Florida day, and my boss had just brought it over from the bank; when it came through the door, it felt like some otherworldly presence had just entered, like your favorite band coming onstage, or the Pope Himself coming to speak to you. But with it came a very ominous feeling of danger.

I was by myself in my apartment, save for the three corn-rowed, humongous security guards that surrounded me, whom we'd hired from a less-than-reputable agency. The night before, under their watch, 8 fifteen-passenger vans we'd rented for the project were stolen. Well, 9 technically, if you count the one that was totalled. (The thieves used it to punch a hole in the cement wall of the lot where they were being kept, so that they could drive off with the other 8.)

We should have gone with off-duty cops, I kept thinking. These guys were salivating over the mountains of cash on my kitchen table. I laughed to myself upon seeing one of them literally licking his lips with his eyes locked on the cash... but not a real laugh. After what felt like days my boss came by and, after noticing the same thing, sent them elsewhere. He did bring my all 120 pounds of his wife though, to help me count the cash, and then left to take care of other things. But now, my apartment was no longer a secret. Fortunately, the state of Florida allows for the purchase and sale of machine guns, so I spent the rest of the day stuffing wads of cash into envelopes with my roommate's Chinese AK-47 pointed at the front door.

After it was all counted and stuffed, it was picked up for delivery to several different sites around the South Florida. I wasn't there to see it, but I was told that the carefully-formed lines of workers, upon realizing that payment was in cash, disintegrated quickly into an impatient mob, as predicted. There were gunshots and muggings and co-workers running for their lives. Don't you love decisions from the top?

Later that night though, there was still tens of thousands of dollars left over, from workers that never showed up. My girlfriend and I re-enacted Indecent Proposal.
(MR KEARNS, Fri 23 Jun 2006, 7:10, Reply)