When your dog eats five of your hard-earned $100 bills while you’re on vacation, you don’t have many options. You have two options, by our count:
1. You forget about it and go on with your vacation.
2. You keep a keen eye on your dog, and whenever he poops, you put on rubber gloves and carefully extract bits of cash money. These you refashion back into approximations of $100 bills, which you tape together and carefully place into a plastic bag, thinking you’re on CSI: Miami. You then take them to local banks, who laugh and show you out.
Wayne Klinkel of Denver took option No. 2, after his 12-year-old Golden Retriever, Sundance, gobbled down five $100 bills when Klinkel and his wife were on a road trip to visit their daughter, according to the Independent Record. When he stopped for dinner, he left Sundance in the car, along with five Ben Franklins. Sundance quickly ate the five Ben Franklins.
“Sundance is notorious for eating anything and everything, so right away I knew what happened,” Klinkel said. “I thought ‘You dumb S.O.B.’ I couldn’t believe he did that.”
Because Klinkel is intimately familiar with what does and what does not pass through his dog unmolested, he followed Sundance around a while, while the dog was pooping, to see what he could find.
“I pretty much recovered two fairly complete bills, and had some other pieces,” Klinkel said. “But it wasn’t nearly enough there to do anything with it.”
However, after he returned home, the daughter continued the work of the father. When she visited Klinkel in Montana recently, she brought a baggie full of little pieces of cash money.
To prepare the money for reassembly, Klinkel first let the pieces soak in a bucket of water with dish soap for a week. Then he patched the bills together, put them in baggies, and went to the bank.
“Eww,” the teller told him. “We can’t take these because we would have to give them to another customer.”
He went to larger bank, where the people who worked there laughed at him.
So, Klinkel is going to the top, the bank’s bank: the Federal Reserve. On the Treasury website, it says that “each case is carefully examined by an experienced mutilated currency examiner,” and a federal government employee, who declined to be identified, told the Independent Record that all Klinkel needs is 51 percent of the bills to be reimbursed.
If his bills pass muster, Klinkel can expect a check. This could take anywhere from three months to two years.
“Guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens,” Klinkel said.
