What does it take to find a lost wedding ring? A determined husband and a team of sanitation workers who are willing to dumpster-dive.
Paul Cass of Manhattan Beach this month took off his wedding ring to nurse swollen hands and put it inside a ring box in a 35-year-old travel suitcase.
He forgot about the ring when his wife of 10 years reminded him how old the bag is and suggested that it is time for him to get a new suitcase.
He continued to forget about the ring when he threw the old luggage in the trash on Tuesday, garbage day.
He stopped forgetting about his antique wedding ring in the afternoon with a heart-sinking feeling.
“That’s when I decided to get in my car, and I’m driving. I’m looking for a garbage truck,” Cass said, adding she called Waste Management to help.
“It was all hands on deck,” Vanessa Caustrita from Waste Management said. “ We notified all the teams involved, the driving unit and the facilities, that there is a high-valuable item missing in a piece of luggage.
Through quick communication, workers were able to pinpoint the truck by the car’s number based on the address.
As soon as the truck was spotted in the sorting station in Carson before it headed to a landfill in Palmdale, the workers began sifting through the truck.
“And I said, there it is. Stop. And they climb through there,” Cass recalled. “They brought the bag to me. I dug through it, and there it was!”
Cass joked that he was divorced from his wife, Qing Kong, for a few hours.
Manhattan Beach Mayor Pro Tem Joe Franklin was proud that the local sanitation drivers took their jobs so seriously that they were willing to go the extra mile to help customers.
The mayor recommends repurposing next time people like Cass think about throwing out an old bag. Cass himself decided to donate the luggage to a homeless shelter instead of trashing it.
Want more insights? Join Working Title - our career elevating newsletter and get the future of work delivered weekly.
