6 Degrees Of Me

Last week a bunch of guys from work and I went out for some lunch. When we were done and it was time to settle the bill, Andy collected the money and passed out the change and handed me this:

I thought it was counterfeit at first since I hadn’t seen Mr. Small Face Lincoln in about 1/2 a decade. Then I got more curious and looked down at the date it was printed. It’s tough to see but this series is from 1950 which is amazing to me for a number of reasons.

For one, this piece of paper happens to be older than my mother. It also happens to be in a lot better shape than some of the “newer’ currency in my pocket:

This other 5 note that I have is 1/12 the age of the first one and in shight shape.

It got me thinking about the history of my 1950 five-spot. Where had it been over the past 1/2 a century that kept it in such pristine shape? How is it still around? Is it even real?

Money is an interesting object. It’s the one thing that you handle every day that was guaranteed to be handled by countless other people. Rich, poor, good, evil, dumb, smart, blind…everyone handles it and doesn’t even give it a second thought.

I just had the strangest idea. I wonder what my results would be if I did a 9th grade styled experiment and swabbed this bill and put it under a microscope? How much do you want to bet that these pieces of paper are literally the dirtiest things on the planet. There’s a good chance one of these bills was handled by that guy who “forgets” to wash his hands after he uses the bathroom.

Another random thought came into my head that I had to verify. I remember hearing that money has trace amounts of cocaine embedded in it. “That’s gotta be false”, I thought. I went over to snopes dot com to find out the scoop:

So often “everybody knows” facts we naively place reliance upon turn out to be embarrassingly false.
Such is not the case here, in that there is some truth to the “U.S. currency tainted by cocaine” claim, but the implications of this conversation-stopping fact are far more mundane than we might initially presume. To put it another way, it’s less shocking a fact than we first perceive it to be because the underlying assumption that every bill bearing traces of cocaine got that way through having been used to inhale lines of cocaine is false.

It’s no wonder why everyone why works at the bank is always so chipper

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