Groucho Marx said, "When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." That's the friend you need to be your shovel buddy.

Every person should have one. You may have heard of them. They're our life-long friends - the person who stole the liquor from their parent's cabinet and got us embarrassingly drunk; they're the ones who ditched us at a party in the middle of nowhere to go home with someone they just met; they're our confidants, wingmen, best-friends, partners-in-crime, and sometimes, even our cleaners.

It's only natural for everyone to have some kind of skeleton in their closet. Those hidden little secrets that sometimes we're too scared to admit, maybe a little embarrassed by them. Sure, when we die our families will go through our belongings, they'll find those keepsakes that we hoarded and use them as artifacts to map out the story of our lives.

But what if you had something you didn't want your family to find? What if your guilty pleasure was a collection of pornography, sex toys or drug paraphernalia? There's a simple solution for something like this - the recruitment of a shovel buddy.

Simply put, a shovel buddy should be a person, life-long or your closest friend whom you would trust to help you hide a body if it came down to it. Their task would entail them to, upon hearing of your death, stop what they are doing, race to your house, remove any embarrassing paraphernalia, and bury it.

The idea is that your shovel buddy will know where every embarrassing piece of paraphernalia is hidden, so they may clear it from the house before the family arrives to go through the belongings.

Interesting concept, so how did it come about?

During their morning show on 93.3 WMMR, Steve Morrison of Preston and Steve, mentioned the word shovel buddy when the hosts were discussing a situation regarding copious amounts of extreme pornography that was found after a loved one's passing.

While the idea of a shovel buddy is a plausible notion, in her column Ask Amy in 2007, Amy Dickinson asked her readers to send in stories of situations where family members had found surprises they never knew the deceased were in possession of.

This led to one reader to reply, "I think the most surprising thing that our kids will find in our (dresser) drawers when we die, is that we had a very interesting sex life - I hope that will give them something to talk and laugh about, while going through our stuff and figuring out who gets what."

Read more:

Do You Need a Shovel Buddy? | By Common Consent

'Shovel Buddy' can put a limit on surprises | Chicago Tribune