Coins

Let me start off by saying I frequently wonder what is wrong with people today… I guess I can answer that—it’s plain old laziness. Maybe they didn’t know that they dropped them; maybe they don’t care, but I find coins everywhere that I go—and frequently money in the form of bills. I know that I’ve handed bills to people who they didn’t belong to just saying to them that I think that they dropped this and handing them money that I found. But this is different. This is a general attitude in ineptitude that gets under my skin, everyone wants to be paid, and no one actually wants to work.

I’ve had this conversation with a cousin of mine who’s my age—in fact we’re only about 6 weeks apart. We both have a work ethic that is rarely seen today. We’ve talked about in relation to 911. Had I made a phone call and been told that the building was secure and to keep working, I know that I would have stayed, I know that I wouldn’t be alive today. I know.

So let me share a few stories coin stories. The first was regarding some bad service I had at a restaurant—Joe’s Crab Shack to be exact. The food was awful, people who came in after me were served before me and when I bill came—which was just under 20 bucks, I handed the waitress a 20 dollar bill, thinking that she would bring me change and that I would add to it for her tip. Yes, even with lousy service I tip; even when I’ve been hurt (parenthetical to this story), I tip. But she didn’t come back ever—even for the rest of her tip. I waited and waited until my patience level was at its’ end. She probably complained about the cheap tip to her friends….

Story two. I was out having dinner with friend. When the bill came it was just under $50.00. The waitress asks if we want change, we say yes, because once again, the change would have shorted the waitress on a 20% tip. So, she brought back the bills, but doesn’t bring the change. When questioned, she said that most people include the change in with her tip, so she didn’t bring it back to the table…what??? You’re presuming that I’m going to include the change in the tip???? Until that moment, I thought that it took a lot for me to complain about service enough to stiff someone a tip and let them figure out what they did wrong, but I had decided in that moment that if she wanted the change that badly, then I guess she could keep it—as her total tip. I’d like to say that I felt badly about treating her that way, but I didn’t.

Story three…now here’s where it really gets interesting.  I’m an honest person and this story will bear that out so please follow me thorough this.  Let me start from the beginning.  I save my change. Every time I buy something, I break a bill, throw the change into my purse, save it to a mason jar, and at the end of the month, I head over to my bank, dump it into a coin counting machine called a penny arcade, out comes a receipt which you then exchange at your friendly teller for cash. Except that I don’t actually take it in cash. It gets placed into a money order which is shipped to my local brokerage for purchases in the equities market. It’s money that I don’t miss, so it’s a forced savings into an asset. I’ve done this for years—in fact, when the banks put in the ‘coin counting’ machine, they no longer would accept coins rolled in wrappers and I miss the old fashioned way  of doing that , and I will admit that counting coins is strangely comforting for me…much the same as polishing silver. My guess is that counting brings a peaceful order to my life.

So being a bit bored, and it being the beginning of the month, I counted my change before I brought it to the bank to the penny arcade machine. I was careful that I had only brought a certain amount of change with me to get an even amount of coin exchanges for dollars—but the counter didn’t seem to see it that way and shorted me $4.00 but gave me an extra three cents. I voiced my concern immediately with the head teller who told me that it would take a week for them to get a tally on overages and that they would let me know of their findings…a week? They could have churned my money with anticipation notes in that time…

I left that branch and went to my usual one, telling the branch manager of my problem. He told me that they bag their coins 3 times per day and out it goes for counting. He told me that he didn’t understand their dilemma and opened his drawer and handed me the four dollars. I told him that the bank had given me an extra 3 pennies and he told me to keep them. Later that day, teller number one called to tell me that she had credited the 4 dollars back to my account, so back to the bank I went to teller number 2 to give him back the four dollars to have him keep his drawer in order. We chatted and he told me that often the machines come back with overages…what??? Apparently I can’t count on the counting acuity of the penny arcade machine—and neither should anyone else.  I had really hoped that he might tell me that they had a not-for-profit corporation that they made donations to, or even a local food bank, so I asked him what he did with the overages if people like me didn’t complain that they were ‘light’ on the coin count. He quickly covered for himself by saying that sometimes there were ‘under counts’ as well, so he seemed to think that it all evened out in the end…ummm…I don’t think so bro. I would think that perhaps in the top 5 things on a banking institution’s daily to-do list might include financial precision.

So, I left the bank, bought a couple of shares of a mutual fund with my change only to note the next day that my brokerage account was missing a penny between the amount of money transferred to purchase the shares and the actual shares bought. I called my brokerage house and was informed that since my penny couldn’t be evenly divided by shares, (and I’m quoting here) ‘we just keep that’. Are you kidding? You just keep my money? I’ll tell you what, just put it back into the account that you took it from. We can’t do that, it’s a securities issue—it was taken out, and it can’t go back. Eight money managers were involved in figuring out how to replace my penny, but it finally was resolved in my favor. The last manager that I spoke to told me that he had worked in that company for 4 years and that no one besides me had ever, ever asked about their missing pennies. And that America is why individuals can’t pay off their debt and the banks and brokerage houses make more money than they know what to do with.

As a post script to this story, I bought a few more shares this week—same dollar amount but three decimal places to the right of the period, there were fractional pennies in my favor….sigh. The universe plays fun tricks unexpectedly.