when does money stop being money?
apparently when there’s only one serial number…
i checked the dryer a few days ago and discovered a dollar bill that had somehow fallen out of a pocket and gotten caught between the drum and the frame of the dryer door and gotten moodged. it used to be that one could take “mutilated” money to one’s local bank and get it replaced, if there was still one serial number visible. i took it to my local bank, but they couldn’t take it, because, apparently, in order for the bank to get “paid” for the mutilated money, they have to have one serial number completely visible, and at least 4 digits of the other serial number visible… and they can’t have just any four digits visible. they have to have either the first four digits, or the last four digits… and guess what?
my “mutilated” dollar bill has one serial number completely visible, and three of the first digits (the letters at the beginning of the serial number don’t count as digits), and the last digit, but nothing in between.
in order to get my “mutilated” bill replaced, i have to go to the federal reserve bank, in seattle, 35 miles away. and with gas at almost $3.00 a gallon, that’s a waste of money.
i’m going to be in seattle on saturday, but i’m going to be a part of the “punk rock flea market”, which goes from 6:30 in the morning until midnight, and, what do you know, the federal reserve bank of san francisco, seattle branch, isn’t open on saturdays anyway.
at this point, i’m thinking very strongly about just throwing it away, or making artwork out of it or something like that, because it’s clearly not money any longer, but at the same time, i can’t get beyond the fact that it looks like money – because it used to be money. it still has the vestiges of the treasury wizards’ blessing on it and that’s hard to overcome, despite the bank’s refusal to take it…
paper money has it’s advantages, but still, i wish we had metal money, or something that would stand up to being put through a washer and dryer without dying… 8/
Perhaps somewhere else will take the dollar and exchange it for something that will spend as currency. Or, if it’s no longer considered money by some authority that you want to accept, perhaps you could make some spectacle out of defacing or otherwise changing it into something else, and watch what happens.
i’ve definitely got half of the bill, but it’s pretty mutilated… but this wasn’t a federal reserve branch, it was a washington mutual branch, and it was in auburn, which is, as i said, 35 miles away from the nearest branch of the federal reserve… but if the fed gives banks different rules for different branches, or gives rules for banks that are vague enough that the banks themselves can interpret them how they wish, it doesn’t say much for the economic security of the country as a whole… 8/
I used to work at a bank, and our rule from the Federal Reserve was that we had to have at least 50% of the bill in order to get paid for it. I just think they didn’t want to deal with keeping the mutilated bill, because you also can only sell it back when you accumulate a certain amount of it, and it just takes up space in the bank vault until it can get sold.