Coin collecting is not a glamorous hobby. I know that. Shaking out my piggy bank and poring over handfuls of change looking for wheat pennies did not help my playground popularity as a child, and as an adult, fewer people than you might expect think that being able to tell if a coin came from Philadelphia or Denver is a good party trick.
But, getting excited about things that most people could care less about does have its advantages. For instance, something happened to me today that would be an annoyance at best to normal people, but which made my whole afternoon.
I went to buy flowers in a neighborhood where you pay for your parking at a machine that gives you a receipt to put on your dashboard. I have noticed that these contraptions often reject perfectly good coins, letting them fall through to the change return box, so I always check the box both before and after I put my own money in.
This time when I checked, I found an unexpected treat. It wasn’t a bent nickel, or a slug, or even a quarter with something stuck to it, but something even odder: an English 20-pence piece.
Okay, it’s not really that big of a deal, but I do love the idea that a machine designed to give me parking validation instead spat out a little piece of Europe.
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