More coinage.

There has been a new development on the coin front. A while back I wrote about how I had a ton of change, and spent a few hours putting it into rolls. The rolled change sat for a while until I finally decided to take it to the bank. If you recall, I took my rolls of dimes in first and this was when I learned of the magic coin counting machine.

You can read the entry here if you missed it.

Well, I finally took my pennies to cash them in. 40 rolls of pennies have been sitting in my desk at work for a couple months (I spent all my nickel rolls on pop; 13 nickels = 1 Diet Pepsi). I did it in chunks. 10 rolls at a time. It takes a long time for the machine to count 500 pennies.

For the first batch, it came up a few cents short of $5. I had a few extra pennies in my pocket so I threw them in there to bring the total up to $5 even. When the machine finished I printed the receipt. It said “rejected coins” at the bottom. I didn’t think much of it or question what happened to the rejected coins. I just took the receipt to the teller to get a $5 bill (actually, I ended up getting 5 of these:



, but that’s not relevant to the story).

Well, today I took my last batch of pennies to trade in. I opened the rolls and dumped the 500 pennies into the machine. While standing there waiting I noticed something that looked like a trash slot. “Hey I’ll throw my empty coin rolls in there,” I thought. On furthur inspection, it turns out it was the “rejected coins” slot- the place where “rejected coins” are sent. There was a bunch of nickels and dimes in there. I knew they weren’t mine, because I didn’t put any nickels or dimes in the machine. I grabbed them and threw them in with my pennies. The machine promptly spit most of them back, but it took some of them. After a few tries I got it to accept all but three nickels, which I put in my pocket. The free money added up to about a dollar. Sweet.

I guess, like me, many people don't question what happens to their “rejected coins.” The location of the slot is not readily obvious. That’s good news for me. I just found a new source of income. I will now stop by the coin-counting every afternoon to check for “rejected coins”. No I won’t.

But I should.