Penny Pincher

A picture of many pennies is a couple of posts back -- this was only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. For at least ten years I've been throwing the extra pennies from my coin purse into cheap wine carafes. Yesterday I finally took a plastic container of them [marginally lighter to carry than a glass carafe] to a coin counting machine at a supermarket -- perhaps a quarter of the pennies I have. I had over 1200 in that one trip.

What I want to say is not about penny pinching really, for that's not much money and I wasn't saving them to be frugal, just to avoid a heavy pocketbook. The coin counting machine was the most user-friendly machine I've ever seen. Yes, ATMs are easy but this one asked as soon as I hit start button on the touch screen, "Have you ever used this machine before?" I hadn't so it gave me extremely easy steps -- which were also available in Spanish. It's certainly not a complex contraption but the instructions were straight forward and the buttons well placed. At one point a message flashed, "You have a lot of coins. Please pause a moment and let me catch up." The personalization was okay with me -- it was like a friend counting my coins for me.

As a person born long before computers, and late coming to using them, and still afraid of many applications, still learning -- I'm off to another one-to-one session at the Apple store this afternoon -- I have a lot of frustrating moments on the internet or using various programs. To have an easy and very satisfying "relationship" with a machine is pleasing -- especially since I think I'll have three more coin counting sessions because I can comfortably carry only the plastic container full of pennies. Those babies are a lot heavier than they're worth! It'll be round about $50 finally, which is nice too.