Spare change
Spare change? Some people take the concept very seriously, and I’m not referring to the man who sits by the gate in the Old City. Somewhere in La-La land, a collector just paid $4.8 million to “own” a penny and a quarter. Sure, the coins were old (and tarnished), but the rarity drove this obviously (too) wealthy individual to continue frantically bidding until the auctioneer did the gavel thing. Please, if I ever get that keen on owning anything, swat me with a gavel!
I’m much better at turning my available cash over to others. This morning, one of those automated telephone robots called me, and checked to see if I knew my birthdate (??). When I had passed the test, the voice reminded me that a mortgage payment would be considered as a polite gesture. I’m easy; although a person at the bank had told me that the “first transfer of funds” was do a full month from now, why argue with a robot? And so I figured out where I could lay my hands on some legal tender, and then I trekked across the snow dunes to present an astonished teller with a story and some cash.
Seems that there are more “modern” ways of paying from Peter to Paul, involving presentation of specimen cheques and the invocation of secret transfer codes, but for now this was satisfactory. And once I was home, I used that nifty online banking app to make sure we had actually moved the beads on the abacus. I am a modern man.
