A pensioner has thanked a bar manager after she raked through bins for half an hour to find his false teeth.
Jack Cook, 84, was at a family friend’s wedding reception with his wife at the The Royal British Legion in Carnoustie on Saturday when his dentures began causing him trouble while eating.
After deciding to take them out to enjoy his meal, Jack, from Perth, placed his teeth in a napkin, which a member of staff then mistakenly put in the bin.
After coming home to discover they were missing, Jack phoned the British Legion to see if anyone had spotted them.
Jack said: “It wasn’t until I got home and I asked my wife, ‘have you got my teeth?’ and she said ‘they’re in your pocket’ and of course, they weren’t.
“We phoned immediately and my friends still at the wedding said there was nothing, everything had been taken away.
“I phoned the next day to let the cleaners know to look out for teeth.
“A lady answered the phone and asked ‘are you the gentleman that lost his teeth?
“Right now I am looking through all the bags to find them, I’m actually the manageress’.”
Jack said he was very grateful to the bar manager, Caroline Rohan, for going through the trouble of fetching his artificial teeth for him and was in disbelief after she managed to successfully retrieve them.
“I thought my god, that’s really good that people took the trouble to do that – go through the bags of food,” Jack added.
“If she hadn’t, we’d have had to go to the skip and look through ourselves, otherwise I would have been a few hundred quid for teeth again.
“Who does that? Who has a manager that goes and looks through bins for a man’s teeth?”
Determined
Caroline said she searched through the bin for 30 minutes as she was ‘determined’ to find the pensioners false teeth.
“It actually took me half an hour, I only noticed when I was about to give up as they’re not like a whole set, like the false joke ones,” she said.
“The napkin had disintegrated so it was actually in amongst the food.
“I was actually quite lucky that I even realised it was teeth.
“I thought it might have cost him a bit of money to get another set and when he phoned me, I was actually looking through the bags.
“I didn’t know who he was and he didn’t know who I was so I asked ‘are you looking for your teeth?’ and he said ‘yes I am.”
“After I spoke to him, it made me more determined to find them because he sounded so nice.”
Caroline did admit the feat was quite unusual for her job position, but was happy to do it if it helped out Jack.