We’ve all had that moment: something you need is suddenly missing — a receipt, a paycheck, your kid’s birth certificate — and a horrible thought strikes you — “Did I throw it out?!?” A Georgia man had the weight of certain lifelong regret sitting on his shoulders when he realized he’d chucked two lottery tickets worth $10,000, thinking they weren’t winners.

The man is a regular at his local convenience store, and had purchased new lottery tickets on Saturday, reports the Rome News-Tribune. Not realizing he’d played the winning numbers, he asked the cashier to throw the old tickets he had away.

Cut to later that day, when it dawned on him that he’d tossed $10,000 in the trash. He went back to the store and explained the situation, and the staff went through the trash at the counter to look for his tickets. Nothing.

“I had to go inside the dumpster cause I thought that I had thrown them away for real,” the customer said.

After he’d left, the cashier who’d tossed the tickets for him remembered that he had dumped the counter trash into another trash can inside the store, and hadn’t taken it out after all. He found the tickets and tracked down the customer with the good news.

“It was a blessing from God,” said the winner, who cashed his winnings this week and then went back to the convenience store to try his luck with some scratch-off tickets.

As for the clerk, he says there was no way he wouldn’t have tried to find the customer.

“If I had kept them it would have been like stealing,” the cashier said.

$10,000 in lottery tickets recovered from Rome store’s trash [Rome News-Tribune]

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