We’ve all thrown out things we’ve probably needed: receipts for something that we wanted to return, a piece of paper with an important number on it, or the post-it with our home’s wifi password. But have you ever thrown out $10,000?

Rome News Tribune reports that for Cedric Jackson, the panic of tossing out a few thousand dollars was all too real.

Jackson, a regular customer at Rick’s Food Mart in Rome, Georgia, bought four tickets on Saturday, August 15th. Of those four tickets, two of them were eligible for lottery payments of $5,000. However, not realizing he had winning tickets, Jackson asked the man behind the counter to throw them in the trash.

It was only a few hours later that Jackson realized his mistake. Making his way back to Rick’s Food Mart, he explained the situation to the staff. They began an extensive search for the tickets, looking through all the areas where garbage can be disposed.

”I had to go inside the dumpster cause I thought I had thrown them out for real,” says Jackson. Unfortunately, their search found nothing, and Jackson left empty handed — and heartbroken.

Fortunately, however, Jackson got a call later that day from the store’s owner, Sarabjeet “Ricky” Singh. Singh found the tickets after remembering that he had dumped the counter trash into a bin inside his office.

Jackson retrieved the tickets the next day, and immediately set to cash them out. That is, after he purchased a few more scratch off cards at Rick’s Food Market.

Jackson says he will use the money to help and to pay off bills. And, of course, he made sure to leave Ricky Singh a nice tip for all his help.