The Cash Box Saved The Day

Sometimes the best prepared plans get thrown away by cruel twists of fate. You aren’t going to believe how a metal cash box became the hero of this story.

My best friend has two daughters. His youngest daughter is an amazing fast-pitch softball player in the Under 14 category. The team that she is on was invited to participate at the ESPN World Series of Softball.

Luckily, the invitation was given over a year before the actual tournament. Participation in these events is costly and numerous fundraisers and activities were created, so the girls could attend the big tournament.

My friend is a workhorse. He delivers milk to convenience stores and public schools. I’ve known this guy over 10 years and he has always been an extremely hard worker, so-much-so that he’s had to have knee surgeries to fix torn ACLs and other lovely things that happen when we get older. The demands of his job are crazy and in typical fashion, he started working a plethora of overtime hours and even took a second part-time job delivering pizzas.

Just about every penny he made for twelve months was socked away to prepare for this expensive endeavor to Orlando, Florida. As the week approached, you could hear the excitement in his voice as his baby girl was going to compete on a major stage for the first time.

He scheduled his time off from work many months in advance and was given the green light to go. Airplane tickets, hotel reservations and car rentals were secured and deposits paid.  Then it happened. Life played a cruel joke and his bosses at work told him he couldn’t attend the event because there were a handful of other drivers that also had requested the same weekend off.

The stress and heartbreak he endured was not only ridiculous, but completely unnecessary. Part of his successful strategy for saving money was incorporating a system where part of his paycheck would go to his bank account and his part-time job revenue would go to a metal cash box that he kept hidden in his room, as a slush fund for emergencies.

This fund served as the extra cash he would have needed to take this excursion, which would have been a kodak moment on his personal highlight reel. Imagine seeing his baby girl pitch like we all know she can and help her team earn wins in this tournament. It’s situations like this that make one become bitter and cynical about most happier things in life.

The family left for the tournament on a Wednesday and as my friend pulled into his garage on Friday, something was drastically wrong. Living in the country is great, for the most part, because it’s a quiet life.

On this day, things were awry. The door to the house was partially cracked, which never happens. As he retells this story to me, he got out of the car and grabbed the baseball bat he keeps in his car.

Nervous as can be, he crept into the doorway and saw his house in shambles. He had been robbed. Someone had taken the time to scout out his place and steal many of his belongings before he got home.

They got the plasma television, jewelry and fine china. Most of the items in the house weren’t collectibles or worth a lot at a pawn shop, so instead of just taking what they could, they thought it would be necessary to trash the place as they left. Nothing like getting curbstomped, when you’re already down on your luck.

As the police came out to interview him, he began picking up the broken pieces. The master bedroom had the door kicked in and all of the clothes had been dumped out of their drawers.

Remembering the cash box, John began searching for it and discovered that it was still there. He had the metal box wedged in a spot, high in his closet. He could tell that they tried to smash it open like a pinata because the box had numerous dents and scratches.

Thankfully, the thieves weren’t able to get the money box opened quickly and just left it behind. I guess they were afraid they would get caught. The remainder of money that he had saved up was, thankfully, still there and he could use that to function, until his family got home.

Leave it to a simple 11” x 7” x 2” metal cash box to change his fortune around. There wasn’t many positive things to hang your hat on during that time, but that box saved some of his bacon.