Through a series of very odd circumstances which I won’t go into right now, I found five separate dollar bills in a trash receptacle, just generally floating around loose (it was a trash container used by at least fifty people, very public). This in itself was strange. Normally I’d think “score!”, but on closer inspection, two, and only two, of the dollar bills were generally newer, crisper, and had sequential serial numbers.
I remember this topic being brought up indirectly once before, and someone pointing out that such a circumstance (the serial number thing) would have to be through some orchestrated maneuver through a bank or something, otherwise, how could the two end up together?
The only other theory I could come up with was that they came from an ATM, but ATM’s generally don’t dispense singles, at least the ones I’ve used.
Any theories? (the bills are sitting in an out-of-the-way spot and have as yet not been used, just in case the Teeming Millions tell me that this is a sure-fire sign of a meth lab in the vicinity, or some such)
Businesses that give out a lot of small bills in change will frequently get packages of them from the bank. I’m sure you’ve seen cashiers handing getting packs of singles wrapped in a band of paper from their managers in exchange for some bigger bills. Those packs will come from the bank.
Banks will sometimes make the packs of bills from currency that has been deposited, but if they need more bills than they have on hand, they’ll order bills from the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve will often distribute packs of brand new bills from the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, and the bills in those packs will be serially numbered.
What I suspect happened is that whoever threw the money away had just gotten two dollars of change from a business that had picked up a new pack of consecutively numbered singles from the Federal Reserve.
It’s been several years, but I used to occasssionally get a pad of 100 $1 bills – that’s the way they were sent to the bank. Sometimes it would be for a gift, sometimes I would use myself. The bills were all numbers in sequence.
Anyway, it was always a lot of fun to go to Walmart or a C-store, and watch the clerk and other’s expressions as I pulled out the pad and starting pealing off bills to pay.
Years ago, there was a book called *Sneaky Feats * (or something similar) that taught how to do things like leave a “wet nickel” tip when the service was lousy, the formula that winds up showing “SHELLOIL” on a calcuator, and other similar silly things. One of the more fun ones, though was to take a stack of fresh, sequential bills and with rubber cement, glue them into a used-up card that once held your checks. (you know…that thing that you slide into the checkbook and tear the checks off of) Slide this pad of money into a checkbook, and at the register, start peeling off crisp bills.
Many years ago when I worked for the government we all used to get paid with nice fresh sequential notes. This led to teams of con artists coming to Canberra on public service pay days and pulling tricks like this:
I have five consecutive 50s and give you the middle one of the sequence.
We stand within sight of one another at a large busy bar.
You buy a drink and get change of the 50.
I buy a drink and pay with a 10.
When I get change for the 10 I say “Sorry about this but I gave you a 50. It was out of my pay, they are all 50s. Looks like the middle one, the number is … can you check the till?” Of course it is there, on top, so I take the extra 40 and head off to the next place.
Wow, I thought I was the only person who remembered that book. I think it also had descriptions of ways to lace your sneakers, or perhaps that was another Scholastic book.