I got a ride home from work last night, and we stopped at a grocery store to use a Coinstar machine. My friend is moving out of the country, so he needed to get rid of a year's worth of coins. I'd never used one of these machines before, but I knew there'd be a fee. The machine charged 8 9/10 cents for every dollar they counted. Oh well.
The weird thing was that the machine refused most of his nickels. Maybe it was because the weight or size was off, but what gives? It turned down at least $5 in nickels. The machine kept spitting them out at us, which admittedly was fun the first few times because it felt like we were getting money, slot style. (In the end I did make a very marginal profit, because he got fed up and gave me the envelope full of reject nickels.)
Also...since my friend and I had bet on how much money was in each envelope, and I had lost, the experience reminded me that I'm grossly inept at judging quantities. I can never tell you how many people were at an event, for example, and I always lost at those dumb "guess how many jelly beans" contests. My aversion to math is a definite corollary.
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4 comments:
That you can id the logical corollary means that you're pretty good at math.
Spencer
Thanks, Spencer, for the kind words, but try convincing my high school calc teacher.
New Yorker article last week calling for the end of the penny: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_owen
I agree. They just pile up in my desk drawer.
Thanks for the link -- don't even have to read it to know that I agree. Does remind me that I miss my New Yorker subscription (despite having fallen so far behind).
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