Everyday Insight

Change for a Laugh

It’s good to know the classics are still around

There is $0.55 on the sidewalk at the end of my street.

I first noticed it about 3 weeks ago when I was out walking in the morning. I usually go pretty early, so it was still dark when I first spotted the change on the ground.

There is a large pack of kids that live in the area. Now that school is conducted from home, they are out en masse quite a bit during the day. I am sure that their parents have shoved them out the door with directions to not come back until much later. That is what I would do.

Just for clarity, four of them are from the same family and the rest come in pairs I believe. So, even though there are about 10 roaming around in a pack, the disease vectors number only 3 or 4 families for those that are sensitive to our new social distancing norms.

In any case, back to the change at hand. Knowing that there are so many youngsters afoot during the day, I figured the coins would be a sweet find for one of them later on and thought nothing more of it.

It was several days before I noticed that the coins hadn’t been retrieved from their spot on the sidewalk. Now before you condemn my eyesight or focus, keep in mind that this is the view from that particular spot on the sidewalk:

So, even when it is dark in the mornings, the lights of the Navy ships in port as well as the general view of Puget Sound tend to captivate my attention more so than the sidewalk on any given day.

But I did find it strange so many days later, that the coins remained in place, so I investigated further.

Yep, they were glued to the sidewalk. Nice! I remember pulling this exact prank as a fourth or fifth grader and I began to now appreciate the beauty of arrangement of this particular rendition.

First off, the coins were scattered some distance apart:

I can appreciate the art this person employed when setting up the gag. First, the coins were scattered widely on the sidewalk, not clumped together so as to tip off the wary coin-grabber. Definitely a nice touch to set them up as if they fell from pocket height and bounced / rolled to their resting place.

Next, as I glanced around, I noticed that there is a sensibly located hedge with a direct line of sight to the coins; excellent vantage for viewing and giggling silently as the naïve try in vain to purloin the dropped change.

And the secondary beauty of the scattered placement now is revealed, as the frustrated coin grabber might then reset their efforts a few feet away, only again to be denied from nabbing a lucky quarter.

Surely also part of the genius is the mix of two quarters and a nickel. Quarters hold enough value that even an adult might stoop to nab them off the ground, but three quarters might have spoken to ruse. The mix of denominations adds to the randomness; enticing the would-be richer to flail in vain to grab the coins, never suspecting set up.

All together a well-designed ploy to play on the practicality of the unsuspecting passer-by.

In a world that seems to change almost daily in terms of technology and the impact it has on our society, comfort can often be found in the familiar and time worn.

Knowing that the neighborhood kids are still going to the coin-glued-to-sidewalk gag for laughs somehow instills a bit of a sense of things being right in the world, despite being bombarded with near-constant evidence to the contrary.

I suppose it is the perpetual lament of the tenured in this life that things won’t ever go back to the way they were in the “good old days”. So, sometimes a throwback to the classics is all we need to restore our faith and suspect that there truly is hope with our future generations.

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Timothy Key spent over 26 years in the fire service as a firefighter/paramedic and various fire chief management roles. He firmly believes that bad managers destroy more than companies, and good managers create a passion that is contagious. Compassion, grace and gratitude drive the world; or at least they should. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and join the mail list.