A bag of movie popcorn nearly cost a British Columbia couple a set of diamond wedding rings, reports Canadian public broadcaster CBC.
Steve and Jeannine Van Yssseldyk, after enjoying a movie date last Wednesday in the town of Mission, bought a big bag of popcorn home for their daughter. Getting out of the car, Jeannine accidentally spilled the bag across the lawn. She cleaned up the buttery mess and threw the whole thing in the kitchen compost. It wasn’t until the next night, when at a restaurant, that she realised that she was missing a solitaire diamond ring, an upgrade from her original engagement ring, and a second diamond band celebrating the couple’s 10-year anniversary.
“I went to the washroom. I washed my hands, and I looked down and said, ‘Where are my rings?’ I actually had to leave the restaurant because I was upset,” she told CBC.
After checking multiple places in the house, Steve pulled up home security footage to figure out when she was last wearing the rings. That’s when they realized that both had likely ended up with the popcorn bag in the compost bin – picked up by waste collectors earlier that morning.
Steve sent Jeannine to buy a metal detector and drove down to the local landfill. He approached the man in charge, compost processor Denny Webster, with an “interesting question”: could he search through the 18 tonnes of organic waste for his wife’s rings?
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“I know what I’m looking for,” he told Webster. “There’s some popcorn and a Timbits box.” (Timbits are miniature doughnuts sold by the Canadian coffee chain Tim Hortons.)
Webster agreed, even helping to separate out piles with his excavator, but he was sceptical Steve could find it in dozens of truckloads of waste. “My brain was trying to figure out a way to tell him to go buy his wife new wedding rings,” Webster told CTV, the outlet that broke the story.
However, Steve just pulled out his shovel, slipped on some gloves and got to work digging through rotting grass clippings and food scraps in search of the popcorn bag. The relatively cool temperatures and steady rain helped “keep the stink down,” he told the BBC.
Some familiar sausages were his first clue that Steve was digging in the right place. He quickly discovered the first ring, calling his wife, who broke down in tears at the auto shop. Within an hour, he called again to report the second ring found; Jeannine had just bought the now-unnecessary metal detector.
“I know how much he loves me, that he’s willing to go through a rotten, stinky compost pile,” she told CTV with a laugh.
