Mom Accidentally Donates Son's Mug with $6,500 Inside After Watching Marie Kondo's 'Tidying Up'
My wife and I don’t always click when it comes to our pop-culture preferences. She enjoys Regency-era romances and most things to do with the British monarchy.
I enjoy hardboiled crime stories and out-there science fiction. Picking something we both want to watch on television can be challenging. But we both enjoy Netflix’s odd hit “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo.”
For those not familiar with the show, it follows Japanese organizational maven Marie Kondo as she helps people work through the stuff in their homes. Kondo shot to fame with her 2014 book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.”
It follows a simple principle: You should only keep things that “spark joy” in you.
Business Insider highlighted a few more of Kondo’s other organizational principles. She urges people tired of the clutter to walk through the entirety of their homes, noting everything within them.
She believes that carefully folding clothing can help keep things tidy, as can storing things in clear containers so that you can see what’s inside them. Most importantly, Kondo believes that people shouldn’t become discouraged and ought to stay committed to the process.
One Atlanta-area woman certainly took Kondo’s counsel to heart. However, the end result did anything but put her in a jubilant mood.
According to Business Insider, Lindsay Preiss decided to tidy up her home according to Kondo’s method. One of the things she decided to get rid of was a coffee mug that belonged to her son, Devon Silvey.
It’s pretty easy to understand why. The mug was an old Disney design that hardly seemed destined for eternity.
So Preiss swept up the mug with a bunch of other items. Then she donated them all to a local Goodwill.
Yet she didn’t realize something. Silvey had just sold his car, which had netted him $6,500.
Because he’d completed the transaction on a Sunday, a day when the banks are all closed, he’d needed to find a safe place at home to stash the money. And the place he chose ended up being his Disney mug.
“(I feel) like the worst mom in the world,” Preiss told WSB-TV. “I mean, I feel terrible.”
Silvey seems to be trying to take the whole thing in stride, saying, “At first, I thought it was a joke or a prank or something like that. She thought I was upset about the mug being gone, which, I miss the mug as well, but what was inside was a little more important.”
Preiss contacted the Goodwill to see if the thrift store could return it. Video footage from inside the store showed an employee dutifully cataloging the mug and placing it on a shelf — where it was presumably purchased.
The embarrassed mother issued a plea, saying, “We would be very, very thankful if you brought it back. I’m just asking someone to please have it in your heart to do the right thing and give it back.”
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