A Change (snicker-snicker) in My Life - A Recovering Physicist's Apology

I’m not one of those crazy guys that starts collecting spare change in 40 gallon drums when he is like 8 years old and ends up with a million dollars in pennies when he is 85 years old. Seriously, I’m not. But I did buy a container for 500 円 ($5) coins about a year ago at the 100円 shop. It reached the point where it was so full I could no longer put coins into it. It was not all the way filled, but it was close enough. So I broke it open and counted the coins. Let’s just say my $1 investment paid for itself exactly 2,800 times. Coin-cidently (hehehe) that is around my monthly salary, so I got to see my pay check in coin form. It was delicious. I don’t know what I am going to do with this influx, probably buy another 500 円 thing! So that leaves me with $2,799 left to spend. Hmmm. I foresee an Nintendo DS Lite in my future (if they are ever NOT sold out all over this country). I will also have to send some home to pay for college loans and “responsibility” related crap like that.

Let me just take this chance to say that the $5 coin is perfect for this kind of thing. I never go anywhere that having the additional $5 would make or break my purchase. My checking account gets no interest (any given Japanese bank’s logo: “Interest? What’s that? Seriously, we have no idea what that is, please tell us.”) So I don’t miss out on valuable compounding storing the money out of the bank. I also don’t miss the cash when I drop them into the container, because it is only $5! Yet it also can quickly sum to a substantial amount of money. Unlike say, pennies or 1 yen coins. As an added bonus, when the jar thing was full it was so heavy that if a puma came at me I could beat it to death easily with my 500円 container. Like a police force, it is nice to know it is both protecting AND serving.

This has taught me a valuable lesson which I will probably corrupt overtime. This will cause me to obsessive-compulsively not spend five dollar bills, and store them in a box of some kind instead. That would be flamboyantly despotic.


92% = 100% (for very large values of 92%)


Ohhh....


Ahhh...


It's like an installation art project, only it's actually worth money: