From Affluent to Effluent
>From Affluent to Effluent:
Pensioner Flushes Fortune
Most people just spend a penny; the pensioner from
Kiel spent 30,000 euros
A 64-year old retired man from Kiel had been sitting
on a small fortune for the past four years without
realizing it. To him, it was all just useless paper.
So he flushed it down the toilet.
What would you do if you had a small fortune in a
defunct currency and you were convinced it was
worthless?
Would you burn it? Would you throw it in the trash? Or
would you take it the bank on the off chance that it
could actually still be converted into legal tender?
Well, a German pensioner who had been hoarding 60,000
Deutsche Marks since the currency was replaced by the
euro in 2002, didn’t consider any of these options and
instead decided to flush his considerable wad down the
toilet.
The 64-year-old from the northern city of Kiel was
apparently oblivious to the fact that the money could
still be exchanged. Otherwise it is debatable whether
he would have stuffed the equivalent of 30,000 euros
($37,000) down the u-bend.
“He flushed the cash down the loo because he didn’t
think it was worth anything,” said police spokesman
Uwe Voigt.
Valuable deposit blocks up neighborhood sewer
After blocking up his toilet and the nearby sewer
system with his expensive deposit, the man called
sewage workers who extracted about half the sodden
currency from the pensioner’s plumbing.
The remaining notes created a bottleneck in local
drains, where most were fished out by the incredulous
workers.
How much of the flushed fortune was actually recovered
remains a mystery.
“There may have been more cash that got away,” said
Voigt. But the pensioner still managed to save enough
of the currency to help improve what the police called
his “spartan” living arrangements.
The pensioner dried out the notes that had been saved
and deposited them at a local bank. It was not clear
whether he had washed them first.
© Deutsche Welle.
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