Change You Can Count On

My first job (not counting my disastrous stint as a 15-year-old mother's helper) was at Rocky Point Amusement Park. There I sold tickets--ten cents each, eleven for a dollar--in the Upper Booth, right in front of the Wildcat. I learned to make change by counting up to the amount the customer had handed me. For example, if the total was $15.50, and the customer handed you a $20, you were supposed to make change by counting out loud, handing them $.50 and four ones, saying, "Fifteen fifty. That's sixteen (the $.50), seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty." It was important to make change correctly, because you started with a $20 cash drawer, and had to "prove the drawer" (balance it) at the end of your shift. Or you heard about it from John Ferla, park manager.

I needed to do it that way--counting up--because arithmetic was not my strong suit, and still isn't. Some people can do arithmetical calisthenics in their heads, subtracting or multiplying effortlessly. Not me. I need pencil and paper, or a nice simple method like counting up.

I wish people today would make change that way, but not for the reason you may think. This is not a complaint about how kids today can't make change. It's too bad that they can't, but since the cash register does the arithmetic for them, you can't blame them, really. But they give it back exactly the way it's displayed for them--dollars first, and then coins. Using the example I gave above, the display says $4.50, so they hand you four dollars and fifty cents all together, with the coins balanced precariously on top of the dollars.

As a customer, I like getting my coin change first, before my dollars, because I find it less awkward. They do it the other way, coins atop the dollars, and I'm constantly dropping my coin change on the ground at the Dunkin Donuts drive thru. Well, I was. Now I tell them how I want the change handed to me. They roll their eyes ("Another quirky customer--what we have to put up with!"), but I don't care. I've got my change without having to undo the seat belt, open the car door, grab what I can off the ground, and bang my head on the way up.

And that's change I can count on.