What was intended to be nice gesture became a race against the clock as a family accidently threw away $25,000 in a grandmother’s savings inside an envelope.
An Ohio family called a waste collection agency on Wednesday in hopes of recovering money sealed inside of an envelope, which they had mistaken for trash, The New York Post reported.
Operations supervisor Gary Capan explained that ‘they were cleaning out their house for their grandmother and they cleaned out the refrigerator, threw out all the garbage, grabbed all the freezer stuff and put it in a bag’.
‘And then the grandma was like, “Hey, there’s an envelope with $25,000 in there, don’t lose that,”‘ Capan said.
Time was ticking for Capan and his team. If they did not get the funds before the trash trucks offloaded the garbage at the landfill, the bulldozers would immediately crush the waste in a ‘nonstop process’.
In that case, a search for the missing envelope would be hopeless.
‘If (the cash) got dropped (at the landfill), there’s no finding it anymore,’ said Capan.
Luckily, the crew were successful in stopping the truck in time and searching for the missing money inside the recycling center where all the trucks got diverted.
‘I told the girls, if it’s in there, we’ll find it for you, because they were pretty upset,’ the recycling center’s operations manager Dan Schoewe said.
‘It took 10 minutes and actually, I said, “Man, it looks just like that,” pulled it off, opened it up and there was the package inside with the money,’ said Schoewe. ‘They were so happy, they were tearing up.’
Capan concluded: ‘Makes us feel good here. Made myself feel good. I was like, “Yeah, that’s awesome.” What a great story. And we’re just glad to help.’
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