Five years of change
23:40 on Sunday, June 26, 2005 • 7 responses
I’ve been keeping coin change in a small plastic box underneath my bed. At some point during my first year in California, I realized the ridiculousness in the fact that I moved about 75 lbs of coin change from one side of the country to the other—Maine to California. I remember the shock of finding out that banks require you to wrap up your pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters into little paper rolls before depositing them. I have childhood memories of arge coin counting machines at banks, clink-clinking away in the background when my mom would take me to the bank before running errands. My god. Wrap coins up in paper rolls? Customer service is having your clients do manually what their business has machines to do?
Anyway, after realizing I’d have to spend a year of my life wrapping coins in paper tubes, I exhausted all of that change in my first few months as a graduate student, paying for everything in change. Eventually I whittled a veritable Fort Knox of coin change down to a collection of thousands of pennies. I ended up taking those on a roadtrip, and at some place in Wyoming or Nebraska, I paid something like $27 in pennies for gas.
A few weeks ago I signed up for a new account at a local credit union. I’ve never liked large banks, what with their fees and corporate interests and all. This credit union has been around for a long time and just about everyone I know who has been here for more than 10 years uses it.
One of the perks they offer is free use of their change counting machines for credit union members, so Saturday morning I brought the contents of the rubbermaid down and, only clogging the machine twice in 20 minutes, made a nice, fat deposit in my new account.
On a side note, whenever I get back from Canada and Europe, I have so much change it’s difficult to meet the return flight’s weight requirements. I like the idea of a dollar coin and all, but damn, it’s not too long before the sheer mass starts slowing you down. The loonie is all well and good until someone heading to the laundrymat breaks a femur.
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