Coin collecting: a frivolous and useless hobby

There are lots of piddly-fiddly hobbies out there, and most are shared by small children and the elderly.

I can’t find a more useless way to occupy my free time than to engage in the moronic act of coin collecting.  Let me tell you why.

YOUR HANDS SMELL LIKE COPPER:

This is a main thing that I can’t stand.  I sort through my culligan bottle full of pennies for two and a half hours, trying to find a 1943 copper, but all I find is a lone 1952 Denver wheaty.  And then what?

My hands smell like copper, blue jean lint, and pocket sweat. Facebook newsfeeds are filled with down-to-earth “wives cures” for getting rid of ants or curing a hangover, but never anything about mixing a concoction of obscure kitchen ingredients  to get rid of that sickening copper smell.

I stopped fooling myself. I now do the same thing with wheat pennies as I do any other penny: I throw them away.

SACAJAWEA DOLLARS: 

Next time you’re at a bank, waste a dollar and change it into a Sacajawea.

The Sacajawea dollar will never be the subject of “Only 90s Kids Remember This” posts.  Almost every sane and rational person in America has spent little more than a decade trying to forget it.

The fact that the mint picked an admirable Native American, one who virtually carried the expansion of the American west on her back; and then chose to immortalize her in gilded poly-metal, (or frozen carbonite for all I know,) seems to me like a thinly veiled dig at the disenfranchised.

The Dutch paid for Manhattan with beads, and now we can chip-in at Indian casinos with equally fake and valueless-looking money. The only thing more obscenely garish is the 50 cent piece, which brings me to the next point.

FIFTY CENT PIECES:

Why? That’s the only thing that I can say.  The one thing that’s more useless than the half-dollar is the half-penny.

I could for see saving up a bunch of these babies, throwing them in a sock, and having a deadly makeshift weapon, but other than that the practical application is limited.

I’m too nervous to try and buy anything with 50 cent pieces. I feel as though if I were to produce a stack from my pocket, the cashier would throw them back in my face and laugh.

“Get out of here, you carpet-bagger! Take your pirate doubloons elsewhere!”

I threw one in the envelop with last month’s rent because I was conveniently two quarters short, but that coin had been sitting in my apartment for quite some time.

Soda machines don’t accept half-dollars, which brings me to my next tangent.

SODA MACHINES: 

Soda machines are notorious for not accepting my pocket change, and this could stem from a number of considerations, but I would like to point the finger at coin collectors first.

Soda machines won’t accept my half-dollars because coin collectors horde them, keeping them out of circulation, as if the value of money is more than… the value of money.

They’re coins, and I am supposed to use them in exchange for goods and services. I should expect that if I were to painstakingly insert 125 pennies into a vending machine, I could press the button and get my Mountain Dew.

Instead I have to rely on CoinStar, a scam that takes a percentage of whatever useless change I feed into it.

So instead of spending money, I become a collector by proxy and I have a bunch of dumb-looking coins that I can’t even use.  This  makes me frustrated at the futility of how our society is arranged.

The concept is really bizarre when you think about it. The fact that a stamped piece of metal could hold an intrinsic value is absurd on its own, and even more so when its value is inflated by collectors.