Looking for my mind

For what value of money would you be willing to rummage through smelly, week-old trash?

I withdrew $60 cash yesterday and folded it, along with a store receipt, into a neat wad and stuck it in my pants pocket. When I got home, I emptied my pockets and wondered why the receipt I pulled out looked so bulky. Even though it was only 15 minutes after putting the money in my pocket, I had forgotten completely. This morning, I woke up and began cleaning the kitchen. I grabbed the receipts and thought, "I won't need these anymore", as I tossed them into the trash. Hours later, it occurred to me that the $60 had been folded within one of those receipts and was now in the trash.

Unfortunately, I took out a lot of trash this morning and included all of the rotten, leftover food that was in the refrigerator plus a pan of chili enchiladas that was left out on the counter overnight. After spending the day ripening in the sun, the smell inside the large, black trash barrel was not pleasant. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever smelled trash this...fragrant. So, now it was decision time--is $60 worth what it would take to pull out and sort through this nasty pile of rubbish? I decided it was. Fifteen minutes later, with garbage juice up to my elbows and all over my shirt, I had been through the entire trash can and still had not found the cash.

I moved on to a few different trash cans within the home--maybe I had thrown the receipt into one of them rather than in with all of the juicy garbage. But, the money was not to be found in the dirty diaper pail (don't ask me why we throw regular trash into the diaper pail, but we do) nor in the small bathroom trash can that featured and inviting top layer of bloody tissue paper that my son left earlier in the day from one of his famous bloody noses. I can't believe how much blood it was! I hope he drank some orange juice afterward and laid down for a moment!

After an hour of looking, I gave up, not sure the whole thing had been worth it. I felt like I just got out of the garbage compactor in Star Wars, minus the creature that swam in the garbage juice.

So, what's your price for being willing to sort through ripened trash? $60? $100? $1000?