Money Money Money¶
513 words
Many things can be said about money. For example that it’s nice to have – or rather spend – it. That way you can travel around, see things and people, have good meals and so on. On the other hand, money seems to be a thing that’s quite good at turning people into jerks and quite a few seem to have reduced their lives to the pursuit of money.
Personally I have a little money obsession as well. Not being one of the purse carrying types I tend to dump the spare change I have in my pocket to my nutella Euro glass – a special 2kg glass of nutella that was sold when the Euro was introduced in 2002.
In fact, that glass only claimed to contain 1,95583kg – where 1:1,95583 was the Euro:Mark conversion rate. And it claims so with a somewhat clumsy use of typography and the Chicago typeface at a large size.
The bottom line is that 2kg of nutella mean we are dealing with a huge glass here and it took me four years to fill it all the way up with small coins. I’ve been pondering to pay the money into my account for over a year, but as the glass is very heavy and my bank is the kind of customer-unfriendly service company who don’t have an automatic coin counting machine ready to dump the coins in – and they rather have you deliver the coins properly rolled in coloured paper they provide, I wasn’t too keen on actually doing that.
But the glass had become really full recently and very heavy as well. So I got those coloured pieces of paper, spilled the coins on my desk and started forming little heaps of ten coins. That took a while and ended with me having quite a few of those heaps.
And after that ordeal, the final step was to roll the coins up. Which luckily ended up being much easier than I remembered it to be. So now I have a bunch of rather heavy rolls of coins which my bastard bank will be willing to accept… I’m at your service!
Of course a number of questions arose while doing this: How much money did I dump into the nutella glass using coins between one and fifty cents only? How many coins are these? How are the different types of coins distributed? Does the distribution I see reflect the distribution of all coins in circulation? How much research will central banks spend on that aspect? And so on. What would’ve been your guess on the numbers by looking at the photos? How does it differ from the actual numbers:
| Coin | Count | % | actual % | Value |
| 1c | 200 | 14 | 20 | 2€ |
| 2c | 100 | 7 | 16 | 2€ |
| 5c | 300 | 21 | 17 | 15€ |
| 10c | 400 | 28 | 19 | 40€ |
| 20c | 320 | 24 | 15 | 64€ |
| 50c | 80 | 6 | 13 | 40€ |
| Total | 1400 | 163€ |
So was your guess anywhere close to the actual result? Mine wasn’t. I had only expected half the amount… so now I’m surprisingly rich! Well, sort of…
