So you think you've had a bad day? Well what about the woman who tried to help her mother by purchasing her a new mattress, only to learn the old one she threw out had a million bucks stuffed inside?!

An Israeli woman known only by her first name, Anat, bought her mother a new mattress as a surprise and tossed the old one out, leaving it to be picked up by sanitation workers. What she didn't know was that her mother recently became panicked by the global banking crisis and had withdrawn all of her savings and stuffed the money into the mattress that Anat threw out. The woman, Anat, is now spending her days combing through Israeli landfills in the hopes of finding the cash-stuffed mattress.

Security guards have been placed on landfill sites in Tel Aviv to keep treasure hunters away, as word spread in Israel of what must be the worst exchange since Aladdin's battered old magic lantern was swapped for a shiny new one.

The Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot published a picture of the distraught daughter searching through a landfill site, having already tried the three other dumps where rubbish from her neighbourhood could have been taken.

The dump manager, Yitzhak Borba, said that his staff were helping her because she appeared "totally desperate", but the task was complicated by 2,500 tons of new rubbish arriving every day.

This should be a lesson to everyone—Package your cash inside of cold containers and stuff it in your freezer, just like ole Dollar Bill Jefferson. Or maybe not.

Daughter Throws Away Mattress Stuffed With Mother's $1M Life Savings [Guardian]