I am gonna admit it. My guilty secret is I love Tom Cruise movies. He’s fun to look at, there’s usually enough plot to distract me for a bit, and you often get at least one good laugh regardless of genre. Sure, some people think he’s nuttier than an airline sack of peanuts, but that’s ok. Loads of people in Hollywood are.

I’m fairly nutty myself, though I tend to think of myself more as fruity loops. They tend to be a little sweeter and cause less allergic reaction.

Now my general rule in any organization is I wanna stay far away from money. Why? Well, cash is a little creepy to begin with between the giant heads and icky feel.  We won’t even talk about the trace counts of cocaine and fecal matter studies prove is on every bill.

Ew. I mean just ew.

But here you have Jerry McGuire’s famous line.  Show me the money.  I guess he likes to fan himself with bills and not worry about what’s on those things.

I recently got to help someone out and discovered they owned a money counting machine. It’s not like I was moonlighting at Trump Tower or anything. I sure didn’t need to count sums as high as $4800 or anything (roughly how much Trump makes an hour), but I had access to a darn money counting machine and I wanted to try it out.  For science and all that jazz. Why not? It was just sitting there all lonely and unused.

Here’s what happens:

You stick your stack of bills on the machine. In my case, that’s most likely Washington’s because me and my friends live a Washington life and not a Cleveland life.  Heck, I’d be happy to see a Franklin every once in a blue moon, but I consider myself lucky when I get to hold a fist full of Jacksons.  Jacksons are like I won the stinking lottery. Welcome to a Washington life. Clearly you don’t really need to stick a stack of Washington’s on a money machine, since those suckers are worth a whopping $1.  An even count would hook you right up with a dollar amount, even if you might be tired of counting after 20.

You tell Mr. Money Machine what denomination it’s counting and it goes to town like a freaking card shuffler.  I don’t think I could play all Money Bags and throw cash off the top of the Washington Monument as fast as that thing spits through bills.  (Note, don’t expect me to do this anytime soon to test the theory. Those glass windows don’t open and what would I throw? $3?

If you are lucky, Mr. Machine will then tell you something like, “15 bills”  And then it will tell you how much that is.  So you know, $15.  It’s Washington after all.

What did I learn? This machine dos not actually align your bills.  Back in my day, (because yes I also walked up hill in the snow 12 miles both ways with no shoes, only one holey sock for both my feet, and gosh darn it, we didn’t get to whine about it) cashiers and bank tellers had to have their money neatly sorted.  All the bills aligned in one direction and whatnot.  Today? You’re lucky to get bills going in only three directions for $2.  Don’t ask me how this can defy such laws of physics and math, that’s the magic of today’s slovenly service.

I also learned that the precious Washington that makes me feel so rich and I hope will buy me a grab bag, but knowing I can’t even get a small McDonald’s fry, can get ripped or ignored and stuck.   If it gets ripped, you do cry since that’s about four mcDonald’s french fries you can’t eat. You might just starve.

 

However, the machines don’t necessarily make the bills in the drawer pretty. And this makes me nuts as I stand in the bank counting to verify for myself that my $25 is really $25 and needing to fix my bills to all go the same way.  I suppose it helps the bankers who do actually deal with crazy sums of money i’ll never be around.  It still makes me sad for the loss of neat cash drawers and the extra time it takes me to organize my wallet on the rare occasion I need cash.

Convenience over organization.  Is it a win or a lose?  The jury is still out for me on this one.  Now the real question is how to turn those Washingtons in to Clevelands…that would be a money machine worth purchasing!

–Lady O