My cup need refilling anyway so I went downstairs to where employees have access to free soda. I refilled my cup with Squirt and was about to grab a bag of Fritos when I noticed there wasn't anyone at the cash register. There are vending machines all over the place, so why wait? I went back upstairs and to the vending alcove and --
Don't you hate it when this happens? I had no coins or singles, only a five.
Well, what the hell. I put in the five and pressed the button. I expected a torrent of quarters but the clinkety-clank was disturbingly untorrential. I reached in and only found four coins.
Su-weet! I didn't know, or forgot, or whatever, that we had a dollar coin again! And here I gots four of em! They're kind of peculiar, though. Never mind having on them the only President for whom English was a second language. Do you see something strange?
No, not the weird color, though it is a peculiarly light-industrial and antinumismatic hue.
Right. No date. No year of minting. No annuation of its pressing from base metals into coin of the realm. (But no war-time sop to religious freaks either, i.e. "IGWT".) I see this as recognition of the difficulty Americans are alleged to have with dollar coins. Evidently the things are never popular. I can't imagine why not. We should shit-can the dollar bill, dump the penny, and while we're at it encourage $50 bills, being as they're not worth what Jacksons were a generation ago. But no one can make this happen any more than they can wean us off miles and degrees Fahrenheit (another ridiculous American atavism). Dollar coins are as shunned as the two-dollar bill. So if they're going to end up in storage to perhaps be trotted out again a decade later, it makes sense not to put dates on them.
But I'm happy to see them out in circulation, and will hoard them with glee.
7 comments:
I absolutely can't stand pennies, nickels, dimes. They weigh down my wallet and drive me nuts. However I don't like stashing them and ending up with 10 lbs I have to deal with either. Cool on the dollar coins. Yah.
Holy shit. They still make Squirt???
And what the hell is wrong with miles? Why do we have to go over to what a bunch of irritable Frogs think is the right way to measure things? I LIKE miles, and inches, and feet, and gallons, and ounces, and pints and what all.
God Save the Queen!
Where's those 3 guineas you owe me?
They still make Squirt?
It's right next to the RC Cola.
Frogs my ass. Klicks are good enough for the U.S. military. And here where us engineers deal with the REAL WORLD as manufactured in China those Imperial units are Annoying Atavisms. Well, except for pints. I do like my ale to come in pints.
And if you dump the penny, we might as well give up binary arithmetic, too, because the decimal system will be gone.
Annoying atavisms! Annoying atavisms you say! BAH!
Good British railways are measured in miles!
Damned Yankee upstart! Damme!
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