Every now and then I read about someone who purchased a used piece of furniture and discovered money hidden inside. Three days ago, a woman picked up a free couch through Craigslist and discovered $36k in cash hidden inside one of the cushions. In 2020, a man paid $35 for a couch from a thrift store and discovered $43k hidden inside. Clearly, we should all be buying more used couches.

According to my records I’ve owned approximately two dozen vehicles in my life, none of which (as far as I know) had large sums of cash hidden within them. Many of them didn’t even come with a spare tire. I once purchased a used Geo Tracker that had something rattling behind the glove compartment; after reaching up and behind the glove box I discovered an old Smash Mouth CD case, which, depending on your musical tastes, might have actually lowered the value of the vehicle.

Instead of a couch filled with money, I purchased an empty cargo van with very few hiding spaces. The biggest thing in the van, the large metal shelves located in the cargo area, had been emptied save for a few random metal washers and plenty of rust. No fortune there.

What I originally thought was one large shelf was actually two large shelves bolted together. As I began loosening the bolts holding the two shelves together, something fell out from between the shelves and landed on the bare floor of my van with a distinctively metal “clank.”

It was a knife.

My first thought was that I had just discovered OJ’s knife. My second thought was, by picking it up with my bare hands, I had just contaminated the evidence with my own DNA!

If you’re imagining a fancy switchblade or Rambo-style survival knife you’ll be disappointed to learn that what I found was your run of the mill steak knife. Based on the condition of the blade I’d guess this one was used to cut straps or ropes. It’s more likely to give you Tetanus than break the skin.

My next discovery came a few days later as I was disassembling the back door in preparation for the latch replacement. While the internal moulding had already been removed, to access the bottom section of the door I had to remove a small panel and the license plate holder. Once those were out of the way, I looked down inside the door and saw a bag. A really big bag.

Look, I’ve never seen a kilo in real life, but I’ve watched a lot of Miami Vice. This time, I put a pair of rubber gloves on before reaching down into the door and removing the contraband.

Because you’re reading this on my blog and not in the local headlines, you probably guessed that I did not find a bag of drugs inside the door of my van. Instead, I pulled out a dirty bag of GripClips.

While removing the first bag, I saw a second bag of GripClips beneath it. When I pulled that one out, I saw a third. When I pulled that out out… I’ll spare you — there were a total of 8 bags of GripClips stashed in the bottom of the door. Seven of the bags came out intact. The eighth had rotted, leaving hundreds of GripClips floating around in the bottom of my van’s rear door.

These specific GripClips are designed to mount to a wall and hold a cable in place — specifically coax cable, like what a cable installer would use. I can only assume that before the van was used to deliver vending machines (what the seller I purchased the van from was using it for), it was used as some sort of cable installation van. How or why a bag, (much less eight bags) of clips ended up inside the door is a mystery. They weren’t in a location that was easy to access, and it doesn’t seem as if a bag, much less eight, could fall down into this particular crevasse. It’s unlikely I’ll ever know exactly how or why these bags of clips ended up inside the van’s door.

Because the bags were so thin and dirty, I opened the remaining bags and dumped all of the clips (along with the two dozen zip ties I also found inside the door) into a plastic tub, which I then filled with hot soapy water and let soak for about an hour. After all the dirt had been removed, I dumped the lifetime supply of clips into a box and put them on a shelf in my garage.

So while I didn’t find a murder weapon or a bag of drugs inside my van, at least I didn’t find another Smash Mouth CD!