A woman's prized gold necklace, which she accidentally flushed down the toilet last fall, was returned to her this week by a San Rafael sanitation worker who fished it out of a city sewer pipe. Yes, he washed it off first.

Ann Aulakh of San Rafael says she didn't realize until the next day when her Italian gold Byzantine chain, a gift from her husband twenty years ago, fell off her neck and into the toilet while she was peeing in the middle of the night last October. She was heartbroken, but thought the thing lost for good. A dutiful friend, however, had toured San Rafael's water treatment plant and knew the system wasn't a total mystery. So she left a message for the "jewelry recovery department" at the sanitation district, and a bunch of employees there got a good laugh out of that.

But! Because the message was memorable, when a sanitation worker came across a necklace during a routine cleaning of the sewer pipeline, he knew just who to call. Actually, he delivered the necklace back to Aulakh personally.

Ah, Marin. Land of happy endings. Oh, except for this.

[Marin IJ]