Todays Youth, Its Scary...

I've never used anything higher than a Quarter for change, but my friend once told me about how he had a similar experience with a Sacagewea. It wasn't so much the coin was foreign, it was just the cashier didn't want the extra hassle of getting it turned in for a bill.

"Glad" is a funny way of phrasing it.

just recently, to add another little story, I also had to convince a woman at a gas station that my halves were not worth a dollar each. I put 25 on my pump and she put 50. I explained to her that they were all half of a dollar and she asked me whether I was sure!

I worked as a teller for brief time 15 years ago .

Some guy came in with this giant set of coins all marked " united state of america $5 $10 coins "
We looked at them prob 40-50 coins in all . They coins were issued by the " marshall islands mint "

They were brass with diff things on them. Like ww2 scenes , man on the moon scence stuff like that

He wanted to deposit them at face value , got mad angry stompped around when we told him they were not minted by the u.s mint or authorized by the treasury to be accepted as currency.

He told us as he yelled and screamed out the door he paid $9.99 to $ 19.99 each coin and we are getting a steal and that we were idiots we should take them at face value ! These are rare limited coins !blah blah as the secuirty guard escorted him out

We luaghed that was 15 yrs ago , I just checked ebay and they sell for around 1$ each

It is fun to see the the look on peoples face when you spend "odd" currency. I have got a total of $250 Ikes at banks and I have kept about 100 of them and I am currently trying to spend the rest of them as tips and as loose change. People who work at the Chipotle love when I spend halve there. They call it "Pirate Treasure"

I'm a little dismayed at the negative reactions here. Any time you face a person with unknowns, s/he is going to clutch unless s/he has been trained to deal with problem-solving situations. It's hard to place the blame squarely on teenagers or old people or schools or businesses which haven't trained their students or employees in every contingency and customer service problem that walks in the door, and if businesses decided not to hire everyone who couldn't count change back (or to fire them), how many people would end up jobless?

When I was still teaching English and journalism, I tried to push my students to be problem-solvers as well as to learn the material I presented (which included Shakespeare, by the way). And yet some of them who are now my Facebook friends still whine and complain instead of posting how they took care of the problems that faced them. (And now that NCLB has drastically reduced the time that teachers can teach, guess what's happening in public schools? Yep, testing and test prep. Although no school will admit to teaching to the test, it's happening.)

Our common sphere of experience here is money. And yet I assume that most if not all of you who posted in this thread had or are experiencing a high school education and perhaps even achieved a college degree or two. So why is it that there are 109 grammatical, spelling, and usage errors so far in this thread? Is the correct use of the English language no longer part of your sphere of influence? And if your answer is "yes", I wasted 34 years of my life.

Here's my point: don't just groan and moan here. Take the time to educate these "limited-experience" workers in what they're missing. Become an active part of your city's education force; you don't need to run for your school board, but if you show up and voice your concern at a school board meeting, if you're serious, you'll be taken seriously. Be a positive force for change, because if you simply complain, you're part of the problem.

And if you can't spell, use the "Check Spelling" button. It might even catch a few added or dropped apostrophes. Jeez.

pls...you make a good point...it's much easier to complain rather than do something about it. We all tend to do that until it is pointed out to us.

PLS:

i can tell you that the issue with the grammatical errors, at least as concerns the younger students, is that no one teaches real grammar anymore. I have an ENGL degree and it was always appalling how students had written 5 pages of fragmented sentences and were still given b's and c's. sure, I got a's but they were worth much less. the dollar isn't the only thing inflating around here. next: the grade bubble!

as far as coins go, can we at least give the caveat that SOME people may need to go uneducated IF they're willing to accept thousands worth of halves each week? or am I now obligated to lose my sweet dump bank?