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August 10, 2005
Walking the streets for money
When I was in grad school, I remembered watching what looked like a freshman sitting outside during lunch and throwing his change onto the sidewalk. Maybe he was trying to impress people ("Look at how rich I am! I'm throwing money away!") but after he left I ended up going over and picking up about 20 cents.
After that I started looking for coins on the ground around campus and realized that either (1) kids have a lot of holes in their pockets or (2) once a penny or nickel or dime hits the ground, kids are too lazy to pick it up. (Laundry quarters, on the other hand, are nearly sacred - no one parts with those). So I started gathering the coins I found and putting them in my Found Money jar. I counted it this weekend.
My girlfriend started picking up money on the ground, too. It's amazing how much it adds up. I thought it was kind of freakish to do this so it took a couple of years to tell other people about my pseudo-homeless person habit of looking for pennies everywhere I went.
But when I told my parents, they took right to it (maybe it's the genes). It has now turned into a game. My parents were beating us for a while, but that's because my mom once found $35 at a gas station and put that in their Found Money jar. We've now come back, thanks to a good string of dimes and quarters and one dollar bill at the Sunday farmer's market.
Another funny thing is all the foreign money we've found. We have a lot of Canadian coins in the jar, but also a Chinese coin, pesos, euros, two German coins, and a New York subway token (found here in California). The thing I find most amazing is that I've found two U.S. pennies in Singapore (the streets aren't as clean as they say) and a U.S. nickel in Venezuela.
Oh yeah - the jar now has $73.02 in it. That's only $97,926.98 short of these three kids.
Posted by brian at August 10, 2005 08:50 PM