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Have you ever accidentally thrown something away that you really didn’t mean to by accident? I think most of us probably have. Or have you ever lost your wallet? Probably less people have done that, but it certainly does happen.
Okay, one more. Have you ever thrown away your entire life savings because you kept it in a shoe box and mistakenly put the box in your recycling bin?
No? No one? I guess that would be a little odd.
In fact, it’s so odd that the story of a guy from Ashland, Oregon who did exactly that, has gone viral.
Last Thursday, this man tossed his life savings, $23,000, into the recycling bin, which was then picked up and emptied out later in the day.
Realizing his critical mistake, the man contacted Recology, the company that provides garbage service to over a million homes and businesses in Washington, Oregon and California, hoping to somehow recover his money.
Good luck with that, right?
“We take quite a bit of material every day so the odds of finding that are not much better than a needle in a haystack,” Linda Wise, the general manager of the Samoa Resource Recovery Center operated by Recology, told the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat.
The Samoa Resource Recovery Center is where this man’s recycling, and money, was delivered.
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Wise said most of the bags full of recyclables from Oregon were sorted the same night the man lost his money, but a few had been left over for the morning crew.
The next morning she told workers to keep an eye out for the box, but didn’t really expect to find it, but “then the box showed up and came down the sorting line and we were all excited to see it,” she said.
Amazingly, $22,940 of the $23,000 had somehow stayed inside the shoe box.
The man, who was very excited at this news, was reportedly going to make the five-hour drive to the recovery center on Saturday to claim his dough.
So now the only questions remaining are, (1) who keeps their life savings in a shoe box? And (2), was the a regular-size shoe box or one of those bigger ones that like boots and LeBrons come in?
I really need to know these things.