Saturday, December 31, 2011

A Hundred and One Dollars the Easy Way

            A few years ago we placed a bowl on our bookcase that was originally to serve as an area to drop off items such as keys, wallets, chap stick, etc. Soon enough it became an area to deposit pocket change, and it kept building and building over the past two years. Very recently, it got to a point where there was so much change in the bowl, things kept falling out and there was no room to leave a wallet or key set without it likely ending up on the floor. It had come time to get rid of the change, and transform it into cold hard cash.

            To transport the change I used empty Chinese soup containers, it had seemed one quart and one pint was just enough to fit everything. My plan was to head over to the nearby Pathmark, which has the coinstar machine that I used many times in the past, and make the exchange in the morning hours before the place gets crowded. Since I was about to come into some wealth and it was early in the morning, I decided to treat myself to breakfast at the newly rennovated Burger King on the way to the Pathmark. Though it was Burger King and not McDonald's, I had a breakfast sandwich which looked conspisciously similar to an Egg McMuffin. The only real snafu with it is they forgot to heat it up properly and it was rather cold (I even easily took the cold cheese off). I guess if it isn't cooked then McDonald's can't complain they're copying the Egg McMuffin concept.  From there it was onto Pathmark and the coinstar machine. I was happy to see no one else was using them at the time, so I had the whole area to myself.

             When I was gathering all the coins into the containers, I estimated that I had about $50 at best worth of change in my possession. The machine started up and I began dumping in the coins. First, I emptied out the small container, all the coins were accepted except a peso from the Dominican Republic that ended up in the pile somehow. Next was the bigger container which took twice as long to empty than the smaller one. I kept peeking at the machine to see how much money was coming in, and it kept rising and rising. It went from $40, to $50, to $70, to $90, and as the final handful of coins were being processed, it slowly inched its way to the grand total of $101.68 and I was estatic at passing the century mark. When done with the coins, the machine prints out a receipt which must be taken over to the customer service desk in Pathmark to receive the cash. The lady behind the desk handed me the hundred and one dollars in cash, but I was so in awe of looking at the cash I forget when she didn't hand me the sixty-eight cents in coins. Not to make a stink over some coins, I let it go and went to use the Pathmark bathroom to wash my hands from all the money handling. I was happy the Pathmark management placed a sign in the bathroom urging customers to report any conditions that aren't deemed satisfactory, but had no interest in knowing what the unsatisfactory would look like.

             I could care less about iPods, iPads, blue-ray DVDs, the real kudos needs to go to the good people who gave us the Coinstar machine. When was the last time your iPod gave you a hundred bucks?...







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