America, What Have You Done To Our Coinage?

[PlotHolio]

I don't look at money very often. I know what it looks like, so what's the point? I just identify coins by size and color and notes by whichever president is slapped on the front.

Today, I just happened to have an upside-down 2012 penny on my desk. This is what I discovered.

That's not the elegant colonnade I expected...

This blew my mind. Granted, it only managed that because it's 2:15 in the morning and I'm drunk, but that's not what this is about.

This is about tradition.

This is about our future.

This is about me wondering when this happened and why I'm just noticing now.

 

[Jess A]

I have this coin too. I've visited your country twice and I collect coins. Different editions, too. I have so much American change (for Christ's sakes, America, get rid of the bloody penny will ya!) it's ridiculous. I have the coin pictured (plus two other editions) and the older editions with different faces, too. I have almost every state on the quarters. May have also hassled the banks for 50c and $1 dollar coins...

Mate - bit worried about your intoxicated state, though!

 

[Chilari]

In Britain we've got loads of different designs for 50p and £1 coins. They have all these special commemmorative designs. Anniversaries of important events in British engineering or politics or whatever, loads of special 50ps for the Olympics last year.

On a tangentally related note: my parents have this mug of foreign money, change and so on in the kitchen. If we have Euros left over from a holiday to France that's not enough to just take down to the Post Office and get turned back into real money, it goes in that mug. There's also a few Scottish notes (which are hard to spend in England because nobody recognises them and some people even think they're foreign money or fake). The other day I happened to notice that they've got a AUS$5 note in there. I'm sure it wasn't there before, recently. I've put Euros in there within the last three years following trips to Italy and Greece, for example. I never noticed Australian money in there before. I don't know where it could have come from - while we've been down under, and my parents more recently than me, it's not been within the last three years - we went there on holiday in 2004 and Mum and Dad were there in 2007 as part of Dad's Institution of Civil Engineering stuff and as part of a work thing. But not recently. I don't know where it came from. All I can think of is that Dad wore a jacket during his 2007 visit that he put the $5 into and hasn't worn until recently.

Either that or there's some sort of international conspiracy to slowly turn unwatched and unspent Euro notes into Australian dollars.

 

[Anders Ämting]

Over here, new coins show up now and again, mixed up with the older ones. His Majesty keeps getting older just like the rest of us, after all.

 

[Jess A]

Chilari: It is a conspiracy of course. We're good at those over in Australia.

We have a lot of different designs, too. It's part of the fun of collecting. I also have some different edition £1 coins.

Anders: I'd love some of your currency. May even have some, somewhere. You're from Sweden, right? Before I go any further

 

[Anders Ämting]

That I am.