Huge pile of Rolex gold dust

[hunterp27]

So the recent thread regarding polishing versus refinishing made me recall an nice find for a friend.........
I have a buddy who is Rolex trained and certified who branched out on his own many years ago. With all the Rolex watches in the DFW area he decided working for himself was a better proposition than working as the watchmaker for any of the large Rolex resellers (non-AD) here. He doesn't advertise or hustle for business, it's all word of mouth and he seems to stay quite busy. We've known each other since grade school and he's really quiet and low profile kinda guy. He works from a shop at his home where he will take "drop ins" if he knows you but mostly he picks up at several of the area resellers were customers can drop off their piece.
Anyway, he will do full serving, polishing, cleaning, refinishing, fixing broken parts and so on. As you can imagine over time significant amounts of polishing dust and debris accumulates from his polishing wheel. He basically would sweep it up and put it in a box and forget about it. Additionally he'd shake out the area rug and sweep that into the box too. It sorta looked like a box of grayish brown dust. After a number of years it dawned on him to take it and have the PM sorted from the SS and other metals only to find he'd accumulated almost 11K worth of gold. Quite a nice pile of Rolex gold dust you might say.