Counting coins

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My bank, TDBank, is very good. Its rates are low, and its staff members are invariably friendly. (It’s one of the main reasons I transferred my account over from the expensive unfriendly Citizens Bank a few years ago.) Also, TDBank has many hidden advantages. For example: its foreign exchange rates are very low (perhaps because it’s based in Canada).

Also: it has a coin-counting machine in its lobby.

This is a huge advantage for people like me who hoard coins. I learned the habit from my parents, who hoarded them also; in my childhood, we spent many happy evenings counting and rolling coins.

But rolling coins is tedious. It’s so much easier to feed them into a coin-counting machine and take the resulting calculation to the cashier and get your money. (Every bit of it, mind you, not like CoinStar, which keeps 10% or more of it as a “fee.”)

The TDBank machine is set up for children. There’s an animated character on the viewscreen named “Penny,” who talks you through the whole process. “My goodness,” she says periodically, “you sure have saved up a lot of money!”

This is a little annoying, but there you are.

The other day, when I was running some coins through the machine, Penny stopped suddenly. “You’ve save up so much money,” she said, “that I’ve filled up my coin sack! An attendant will come help you shortly.”

And an attendant did. As she finished up, she turned to me and said (I thought): “Just touch your nose and you’ll resume.”

I thought she was joking, or that I’d misheard. So I touched my nose.

The attendant grimaced and pointed to the viewscreen. “Her nose,” she said. “Touch her nose.”

Ah. It all made sense suddenly.

Am I not a stupid funny old man?

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