Mike McArdle from Aurora in Ontario, Canada, was left baffled as to the whereabouts of $350 Canadian dollars ($262) he received for a table sold through an online marketplace.
“I couldn’t rack my brain about where I could have left it and how I possibly lost the money,” he told Newsweek. “I had left the cash on my office desk, but when I went to deposit it a few weeks later, I realized it was missing.”
According to a survey by iPhone smart-location app Pixie, the average American spends 2.5 days a year looking for things that have been misplaced. Worse still, an estimated $2.7 billion is spent on collectively replacing these presumed lost items.
McArdle’s loss of the cash was shaping up to be a costly one, too. That is, until the day his daughter, who was aged 4 at the time, told him she “wanted to play store.”
“She had this toy cash register in her room and had set up a little makeshift store,” McArdle said. “When I went to go buy something, she opened the till to give me my change, and there it was.”
Sitting at the back of the plastic cash drawer was McArdle’s missing money.
“Obviously, I would never think to check there,” McArdle said. “My daughter is an honest kid and would never intentionally steal anything. I asked her about it, and I remember her saying she didn’t see it, and asked what it looked like.
“I guess Canadian money looks like some of her toy money, so I can see maybe where the mix-up was and, at a young age, she didn’t really have much experience handling real cash.”
Coming at a time when the family was busy, following the birth of his second daughter, McArdle put the incident down to the chaos of their home life.
He thought nothing more of it until he found himself going through old pictures on phone and came across a picture of the plastic toy register with the cash inside.
“I remembered how relieved I was to find it and how funny it was when I realized where it was. It had been missing for a few months,” McArdle said.
Eager to share his experience online, he posted the picture to Reddit, with the resulting post garnering over 137,000 upvotes.
Some Redditors shared similar experiences. “Wife thought she’d washed her wedding ring down the drain. Found it in my 5 year old’s jewelry box,” one user wrote.
Another commented: “I once called the police because my MacBook Pro was stolen. 6 months later I found it under my daughter’s stuffed animals. She wanted to play games, drained the battery, thought she broke it, then hid the evidence because the police were looking for the thief.”
A third, meanwhile, posted: “We were once stuck at home for 2 days because we couldn’t find our keys. Daughter had them in her room, at the bottom of the toy chest.”
Elsewhere, others suggested ways to prevent similar incidents happening again, with one Redditor writing: “I was having the same problem with my kid, so I bought a big stack of movie prop money online. It’s fun seeing the look on guests’ faces when they see a 5 year old walking around with real looking $10k in bills.”
Thankfully, McArdle said there have been no repeat incidents. “It’s not typical for me to have cash lying around but, we’ve explained to the kids about not taking things that aren’t theirs, especially without asking,” he added. “It’s never happened again.”
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