Wednesday, 10 June 2009

Trashing Stashed Dosh


There is an old saying "you make your bed and you lie in it". The literal meaning is that if you make your bed in a bad way, the consequence would be you would have an uncomfortable night's sleep. The metaphorical meaning, however, is that you have to live with the consequences of your own decisions and actions, so it's best to think carefully before doing something. In the following story, copied from Yahoo news, we have both the literal and metaphorical meaning.

Dumped mattress lands cash in trash in Israel

"A stash of cash landed in the trash when a woman in Israel dumped her mother's mattress not knowing it was stuffed with the equivalent of about one million dollars.

Israeli media reported that the 40-year-old woman showed up at a garbage dump in a panic on Tuesday, looking for the valuable bedding.

She had bought a new mattress for her mother and, wanting the gift to be a surprise, threw away the old one. She then found out the decades-old mattress contained her mother's life savings.

Workers are helping her search the garbage, but have found no sign of the cash so far".

An Unfortunate Surprise
For many years the mother literally made her bed and lay in it and unknown to her daughter, was stuffing the mattress with approximately one million dollars, only to have the daughter unwittingly throw the mattress out one day because she wanted to "surprise" her mother with a new one! Oh dear....

How would you feel if you were the mother? How would you feel if you were the daughter? What is the moral behind this story??

Vocabulary
To "stash" something means to hide something secretly
To "trash" something means to put something in the rubbish bin. "Trash" means rubbish.
"Dosh" is a UK slang expression for money.

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