What’s your best lost-and-found story?

One Iowa couple is grateful to have recovered a missing gadget with the help of technology and some willing waste agency workers. As the Associated Press reported this week:

WAUKEE — A Waukee woman whose iPhone ended up in the bowels of a garbage truck has the device back, thanks to a GPS chip and the kindness of some trash collectors who sorted through garbage at the landfill.

When Allison Peterson couldn’t find her phone last week, a tracking program on her computer showed it zipping through her neighborhood. She realized it likely had fallen out of her pocket and into an old green recycling bin she’d tossed out.

Peterson tracked down the garbage truck and driver Brent Klaassen called the phone, but its ringer was off. Klaassen offered to let her look for her phone at the landfill. She declined — but called her husband, Mark.

“Once she told me that it would cost around $700 to replace the phone, I said I’d drive up and see what I could do,” he said.

Several workers for Metro Waste Authority and Waste Management joined in his search. The found the slightly damaged iPhone on their second pass.

“The actions of these folks saved me a large amount of money, got me some brownie points with my wife … and made me appreciate how people who didn’t even know me, had nothing to gain and probably thought I was crazy, took the time to help,” Mark Peterson wrote in a two-page thank-you letter.

Klaassen and his co-workers have seen lost valuables before. But this time, the GPS chip let him separate the trash from the rest of the landfill.

“If this had been dumped with all the other trucks delivering the garbage, there’s no way this would have been found,” said Reo Menning, a spokeswoman for the Metro Waste Authority.

What’s your best lost-and-found story?