Mattress safer than the banks?
Over the past year, the banking crisis has revived the old quip that stuffing your money in your mattress is safer than other options.
An Israeli woman did that, and even that turned into a crisis. No joke.
The woman told The Associated Press that she bought her elderly mother a new mattress as a surprise present on Monday — and threw out the old one.
The next day, she said, she remembered that she had hidden her life savings inside the old mattress. “I woke up in the morning screaming, when it hit me what happened,” said the Tel Aviv woman, who asked not to be identified.
She went to look for the mattress, but it had already been hauled away by garbage collectors, she said. Searches at three different landfill sites turned up nothing.
She said the money was in U.S. dollars and Israeli shekels. She refused to say how she acquired such a large sum. “It was all my money in the world,” she said. There was no way to verify her claims, and she refused to disclose key details.
Gosh, you’ve got to feel really sorry for this woman. Cynics won’t, but I do. The manager at the city dump and his staff are helping her desperate search for the mattress.
The woman said the money had been stashed in a mattress because she had had “traumatic experiences with banks” in the past. She would not elaborate.
