By Dick Brooks
For Capital Region Independent Media
I wish they’d stop messing around with our money. I’m not referring to how the government spends the stuff or to the fact that it now takes a wheelbarrow full of it to buy a loaf of bread. I’m referring to United States currency and coin of the realm.
The new bills look like play money. They still have the same familiar faces on them except now they hang over in all directions and the lovely pastel shades, which were probably included on the advice of one of the designers on The Home and Garden Channel, just annoy the heck out of me.
I understand why they did it in these days when any 8-year-old with a good printer can crank out replicas as good or better than The Mint originals. All the colors and the invisible strips are supposed to be impossible to duplicate and for all I know they probably are, but I don’t think it’s going to solve the problem of counterfeiting.
I rarely see a clerk holding a bill up to the light; occasionally I see one swipe a bill with a magic pen of some kind but usually nobody checks.
In fact, I’ve had a couple of cashiers lately that I think would have accepted Monopoly money. The one that stands out in my frequently failing memory was behind the cash register in a local big-box store. He was listening to his MP3 player, although I don’t know how he got the ear plugs into his ears past the multiple earrings that started somewhere near his navel and ended in his eyebrows. A coy little tattoo of a skull peeked over his shirt collar and he had something that looked like a silver lima bean stuck through his tongue.
My purchase came to $4, I gave him a five, he gave me back 16. I pointed out his error, he mumbled something past the lima bean, took back the $16 and gave me $6. I handed him back the five and told him to go get his earrings polished on me. He clicked gratefully and I departed. I probably could have taken a piece of green construction paper and handwritten a number on it and he’d have taken it.
I can’t really lay all the blame on him, it was probably the first real money he had ever seen. I seem to be one of the few who still buys things with cash. More and more folks don’t even carry cash, they swipe for everything. It’s gotten so bad, I saw a lady the other day trying to swipe a $10 bill in the market.
I don’t like credit cards. I never feel like I’ve really paid for whatever it was that I used it for and the cops are going to grab me on the way out of the store.
I like the comfort of cash. There’s nothing like a nice fat roll of bills in your pocket or a fat wallet to sit on to bring comfort to your soul. It doesn’t matter that that fat roll of bills is all $1 bills, it’s still a fat roll and there’s comfort it that.
Even a pocket full of change has its own comfort factor — it’s satisfying to feel your pants being pulled down as you jingle your way through life.
There are more and more folks who don’t use cash or coin anymore, everything is charged and then at the end of the month, the bill comes and they write a check—no real money anywhere.
That may explain why the government keeps playing with our money; they may be trying to make it more fashionable so folks will start using it again. I don’t think it’ll work. I think money is a thing of the past, old fashioned and out-of-date.
If you’ve got a lot of the old stuff hanging around your house and want to get rid of it, give me a call, I still like it.
Thought for the week — “Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas, take your next trip in kilometers.” ~ George Carlin (RIP)
Until next week, may you and yours be happy and well.
Reach columnist Dick Brooks at Whittle12124@yahoo.com.
