Cha-Ching!

This morning I was laying in bed thinking about money. Not in the "how-are-we-going-to-afford-that?" sort of way, but in another way entirely.

First I thought about $2 bills.

I'm not a currency collector, but I've been given $2 bills my whole life. My great-grandparents used to give all of the grand kids a $2 bill for Christmas every year. I think some of my other grandparents may have done something similar because I accumulated $2 bills on a regular basis as a child. I think I was expected to store them away somewhere safe because $2 bills are rare (but not that rare, obviously, since everyone handed them out to me like candy bars). I think I was supposed to get rich off them or something.

Well, too bad - because now I don't have a single $2 to my name. I don't know where they went. Somewhere out there, there is a stack of $2 bills that belongs to me.

After I thought about $2 bills, I thought about state quarters.

When the state quarters were first released, and I heard that Utah would be one of the last ones put into circulation, I was totally bummed. I kind of thought Jesus would come before I ever saw my state quarter.

Well, amazingly, the world survived through 2007, and the Utah quarter integrated into the United States' currency without incident. In fact, the world survived long enough that all 50 states made it.

During those state quarter years, I discovered a group of people whom I began to refer to as "quarter checkers."

These were the people that were trying to collect one of every state quarter.

Quarter checkers drove me nuts!

At my job, we would have a line of antsy customers with arms full of merchandise shifting their weight back and forth from arm to arm, leg to leg, while some crazy quarter checker stood at the register and sorted through a coin purse to make sure he didn't pay with a Maryland or a Pennsylvania.

Some of them would even ask me to sift through my till and see if I could find them a specific state.

"Hey, do you have a Texas in there? I'll trade you for an Alabama!"

State quarters were like Pokemon cards for old people.

I got to the point where I could identify the quarter checkers when they came into the store, and I would roll my eyes and moan, "Here we go..."

After a few years, I changed jobs, and found a new community of quarter checkers.

Even though the state quarters have all been released, I'm sure there are still people out there checking for quarters. Now they are looking for specific America the Beautiful quarters. I'm glad I get to sit this one out.