"RoseGarden" - - - - - - - from - nscave

It wasn’t that long ago when we heard someone say they were using plastic to pay for something we were talking about some sort of credit card.

Now some of our Canadian money is made out of a kind of plastic. First it was the $100. variety that appeared. I didn’t have to worry too much about those because my denominations rarely get up that high. I heard the stories of how they would shrink when washed and how they would melt at high temperatures.

I’m not sure if this was the case because I rarely wash (launder?) my money, and the temperature where my bills are kept rarely exceeds any melting point. So these money tales didn’t affect me much.

Now our plastic $20. bills are out. I received my first ones from an ATM yesterday. They look pretty good with their transparent see-through areas and anti-counterfeit measures.

Earlier I was standing in a checkout line and heard a gentleman say to the cashier: “You have to watch those new twenties, they stick together real good, and you won’t notice.”

Back to the ATM, I was almost sure it short changed me on first count, for it appeared I was about sixty dollars short. At the same time I recalled the gentleman’s comments to the cashier.

This time counting and observing more carefully I did discover that not two, but three twenties were sticking together. At first look, it seemed the thickness and feel of only one.

After some picking and fingernail prying, the three bills came apart. That’s scary and something to watch for with our new bills. You can’t bend the corners like you used to with the old paper kind, so maybe they will not stick as much after they are used a little and get some of that human dirt and germs on them.

In the meantime I think I was outsmarted by a machine. How did that ATM know there were three brand new twenties stuck solidly together in the middle of that bunch of old twenties?

This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License