After winning a million euros, a woman mistakenly tossed the lucky lottery ticket into a trash bin.
But the local sanitation company in southern Italy launched an hours-long search through an entire truck of trash.
Waste management company SANB administrator Roberto Nicola Toscano told AFP news agency that the ticket was found “miraculously still in one piece.”
The story begins with a simple misunderstanding. When the woman went to redeem her ticket at the machine inside her local tobacconist, she did so without checking the numbers.
It told her that the ticket was “non-payable.” Funnily (and almost tragically) enough, this can mean one of two things: either there are no winnings on the ticket, or the winnings are too substantial to be redeemed by the small shop.
The woman threw the ticket away thinking it was the former case, but a family member noticed the winning numbers were the ones she always played—associated as they were with a loved one—and called her to ask if she’d bought a ticket.
Realizing her mistake, the pair rushed to the shop only to be told that the trash had already been taken away.
SANB received the woman’s frantic phone call and Toscano began to try and reconstruct the ticket’s journey. Believing they’d identified where it might be hidden, the truck in question was transferred to a special station equipped with safety measures to protect sanitation workers from potentially dangerous material inside the trash.
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Searching for a whole day, Toscano’s staff recovered the ticket to the woman’s tearful delight.
German news outlet DW quoted Toscano as telling Corriere della Sera that “professionalism, organization, and a great deal of luck made the moment happen,” and that the added cost to taxpayers of the search would be covered as an offered courtesy of the lucky winner.
It’s a double-stroke of luck, and a reminder never to give up searching for your lost possessions.
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