Bismarck American employees go dumpster diving to find coworker’s lost wedding ring

BISMARCK, N.D. (KFYR) - How far would you go to help a coworker find something they’d lost?

At one Bismarck bank, a group of colleagues recently proved they are willing to go the extra mile.

In fact, the crew at American Trust Center would even go dumpster diving.

Trina Burns has been wearing this wedding ring for more than three decades.

“It will be 32 years this year,” said Burns.

She’s happy to have it back on her finger.

“I never thought I’d see it again,” she admitted.

When she left work last Wednesday, Burns realized her ring was missing.

“I thought I must not have put it on that morning. When I got home, I looked for a little bit and then I panicked a little and then started tearing everything apart,” she recalled.

She searched with no luck. The next morning, Trina called her colleague, Alyssa Hanson, and asked her to keep an eye out for her lost ring.

“You could hear how upset she was that she had lost her ring and she couldn’t find it,” said Hanson.

Burns was working from home and had no idea Hanson and three other colleagues were digging through every piece of trash in the dumpster outside their downtown Bismarck office.

“I needed gloves of course. I wasn’t just going to go in there without them,” said Titus Gietzen.

Gietzen ended up crawling completely into the dumpster.

“We thought the garbage bags would be a little bit higher up, but I had to start diving in a little bit. And then there were a few I couldn’t quite reach so I decided to get all the way in,” he explained.

The crew looked through every bag of trash in this dumpster, without any luck.

“It was a bit of a defeat at the end of the day that we hadn’t found it,” Hanson admitted.

The next day, the ring showed up; someone came across it in a nearby parking lot.

“They found it in spot 23. I was parked in 24,” said Burns.

And while she’ll never know how the ring ended up there, or how it found its way back to he, Burns says this has restored her faith in people; in the stranger that found the ring, and in her office mates.

We asked Burns, “Would you dig through a dumpster for your coworkers?”

“I wondered that same thing and yeah, I would have,” she responded. “Especially now I would because I need to repay the favor. "

While they’ll probably tease Burns about this for a while, they say they’d go dumpster diving for her anytime.

“She’s got 32 years of memories in that wedding ring. You can’t just replace that,” said Hanson.

Now, this ring holds even more memories.

Those who dug through the dumpster said while they didn’t find the ring, they did learn some interesting things about their fellow American employees.

They say judging by the amount of dental floss they found in the dumpster, their coworkers are serious about their dental health.

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