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Digital Slob Curt Brandao |
Coinstar beats rolling
up that ‘feral change’You can tell a lot about people by how they handle the Almighty Dollar.
I don't mean their 401(k) or their personal loans to alcoholic stepbrothers, but rather how they physically hold their money.
Respectable People keep their currency locked down using imposing leather wallets, purses with multiple clasps and zippers, and vice-like money clips.
Digital Slobs, however, have an open-door policy with legal tender, letting it settle between our car seats, hide in our socks, or run loose in our pants. When we must pay up, we'll grab blindly into one crevice or another, hoping to cull some green out of a clumpy trail-mix-like substance that also includes lint, fur-lined throat lozenges, Subway Club Card stamps and maybe a movie stub from "The Hulk."
Respectable People shake their heads in disbelief as we stroll along (our frayed pockets often setting a buck or two free in the breeze), certain all Slobs are muggings waiting to happen. In truth, however, our disheveled demeanor is the perfect defense, because thieves much prefer going after valuables in neat, predictable locations (i.e. Respectable People). After all, why go after a Slob's money when it's obvious he has no idea where most of it is?
All greenbacks have a story to tell. Crisp bills have been in the sole custody of Respectable People. Faded, cloth-like bank notes on the verge of disintegrating like the Dead Sea Scrolls have been crumpled, uncrumpled and re-crumpled by multiple Digital Slobs. And any dollar held together by Scotch tape is a Digital Slob survivor that wanted to die, but was forced by a greedy Respectable Person to continue its tortured existence. If you find one of these, hold it to your ear and you can hear George Washington desperately whisper "please, please kill me."
From the cut of their jeans to their own reputations, Respectable People are averse to all things loose, especially "loose change." Therefore, they invest in all manner of battery-operated coin sorters to imprison their currency for future bank deportation. For Digital Slobs, however, "loose" hardly captures the untamed nature of our coinage. Look at the seven cents lining our baseboard or the two damp pennies resting on our shower drain, and you realize "feral change," or "free range change" would be more descriptive. When it's time to round it up, well, that's what vacuums are for.
But thanks to Coinstar (www.coinstar.com), Slobs now have an option almost as effortless, yet much more profitable than leaving $11.47 sprinkled behind as a house-warming gift for the next tenant. These nifty machines in grocery stores launder metal money, for a cut of the action, of course. From a Pyrex bowl, I recently poured into one Coinstar about 1,200 pennies, 15 nickels and dimes and, by happenstance, one long-lost tie clip (which it spat out, for some reason, even though I think it's worth two bits at least), and it gave me a receipt for 89 cents on the dollar that a cashier cashed out. I found this preferable to wasting a weekend counting to 50 with a paper-cut-scarred index finger stuck in a cardboard roll.
For good or ill, technology will soon free our pockets of all minted moolah, perhaps replacing it with bar codes on our foreheads that give EZ Mart clerks access to our entire credit history every time we want some Yoo-hoo. Until then, however, Coinstar can help Digital Slobs wring every last drop of value out of whatever money we trip over.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Curt Brandao is the Star-Bulletin's production editor. Reach him at: cbrandao@starbulletin.com
