After my wife died I wore her wedding ring. The ring was too small for my ring fingers and a loose fit on my little finger.
One day I was demolishing an old shed in the garden prior to selling the house, so I ordered a small rubbish skip and loaded the contents of the shed, old rolls of Roofing Felt, Tins of paint, Roofing Bitumastic, old gardening tools etc: into the skip.
Job finished and I went inside to clean up...the ring was missing!!
That was midweek, and the skip was to be collected on Saturday morning. I spent the next two days searching, unloading the skip into the front garden, crawling on hands and knees across the lawn between the house and where the shed had stood, only stopping when it got too dark to see properly.
Desperation is probably the best description, but to no avail. A very difficult two days...
On the Saturday morning I watched the lorry Driver swing the skip aboard the Skip Lorry and climb into the cab and slowly start to drive away. As he did so I saw something glinting on a 5 gallon Bitumastic tin...I ran after the lorry and banged on the Driver's door, he stopped and looked at me as if I was mad when I said I wanted to get up into the skip. Luckily we were still in the quiet Cul-De Sac where I lived, so I got up into the skip and there, stuck into some Bitumastic which had run down the side of the tin and under the bottom rim, embedded in the sticky black tar was the ring.
I can only think that while moving stuff around as I cleared the shed I had put the tin down on the ring after it had fallen from my finger and it had got trapped in the Bitumastic under the rim of the tin.
True story, the ring now lives in a box at home with other items of value.
but it's a tad infuriating...
