I'm sitting here in my cubicle, thinking about what I need to do next. I've already attended a meeting and done some proofreading. Oh yeah, I need to blog.
Before starting my blog for today, I figured I'd stroll over to the vending machine and get a cold, tooth-rotting can of soda. A trip through the nether regions of my backpack revealed a quarter, two nickels, a dime, and no less than eleven one-dollar coins. Since our soda vending machine is extremely old-school and the dollar coins are barely bigger than a quarter, I'm not about to drop a dollar coin into the slot to find out that my dollar only has 25 cents' worth of value to the vending machine. I need 60 cents to buy a soda, so with my quarter, two nickels and a dime, I'm 15 cents short unless I want to waste a dollar coin and cash in 100 cents to get 25.
How did I get these dollar coins? Easy. I went to the Post Office and fed a $20 bill into a stamp vending machine. I purchased about eight bucks' worth of stamps, and the change slot quickly dumped a bunch of these dollar coins into my life.
I've never used a dollar coin before, and no one has given me one as change at any store. Why do they exist? I figure someone at the U.S. Mint wanted to make a name for him-or-herself and figured the best way to make that happen was to come up with a new bit of currency. Of course, this meant that taxpayer money was spent on market research, minting machinery, and distribution.
Eventually, I'll spend these things. In the mean time, they're yet another reminder of how much waste our ever-expanding government creates. At least these lame coins gave me some blog fodder today.