Okay, I admit it now. I'm hooked big time and my view of the world of coins has been forever changed. It has also changed me. Remember long ago when the game Tetris first made its appearance? The commercial said, "You'll be Tetracized!", and that was no joke. After my first several games, I started seeing those crazy Tetris blocks in many everyday things I'd seen before. But now it was different. Things like Tile walls, the tiles in the shower, even cars on the freeway would suddenly become Tetris blocks trying to fit in place. I thought I was going crazy, but my friends assured me that it was happening to them as well. Whew! Close one. Okay, one thing I've recently learned about coins is that the more I looked, the more I saw. When I first started collecting coins when I was young, I'd just see a coin that looked interesting and would toss it in that brown paper bag along with all the other coins my father had given us from many different countries. That was that. Or so I thought. Decades later I brought them all and began sorting them out by countries and dates. I also decided to learn a little more about them and because of the wonderful world of computers and Google, I found sites that showered me with so much information that it piqued my curiosity even more, and I sought to find one of those double die coins. So I visited my bank and got a 50.00 bag of penny rolls and breezed through them, looking only for the telltale double die design. Shouldn't be too hard, right? I thought I could do it with just some reading glasses to sharpen up the images. I separated the pure copper pennies from the rest just because they were copper. I didn't even look at them carefully. Then I started separating coins that had machine doubling. I also made categories for pennies that had zinc showing. But then it had to be categorized even further so I labelled them 'zinc showing' and 'zinc doubling'. Oh-oh, this was getting serious. I have like 20 different categories for every little thing different. I had to beg my parents not to throw away their pill containers so I could categorize more coins. The more I looked, the more I saw, and soon I was going through that same bag of coins again, but this time with a magnifying glass. I was so engrossed on just the obverse sides of the coins that I realized that I surely missed some interesting things on the reverse side. Oh well, there's only one thing to do, go through that same bag yet again. I remember the first time I went through the bag, I went through 5,000 pennies in several hours. Now, I can stare at a penny for the longest time, examining everything as carefully as I can. A little voice finally says, "You can put this one down now, there's plenty more that need to be looked at you know..." So now, instead of being Tetracized, I'm coinacized, and once again, I'm seeing things in everyday things. Like this car I was following. It was a Mazda 3 and I'd probably followed this model of car many many times before, but after being coinacized, all of a sudden, that 3 sure looked like the 3 on the end of a 1993 or 2003 coin. Other thoughts have begun seeping into my mind, like looking at a pool where people make wishes and throw coins in made me wonder if there was the Holy Grail coin in there somewhere. Made me want to ask the caretaker if I could trade those coins and just throw a 20.00 bill in there (But you know I just gotta check it first though! Aaargh!). Or when I was paying the check at a local restaurant, and while the woman rang me up, my eyes wandered over to that bowl with the sign, "Take a penny, leave a penny". I'd seen that bowl many times before, but now I caught myself trying to look at those pennies quickly but thoroughly before I got my change back without looking too weird. I don't mind being a little weird, just not too weird. I ogled that bowl of pennies as if it was the June pinup of some girlie magazine. She saw me staring intently at the bowl and gave me a puzzled look, along with a hesitant, "Thank you....come again." So, yeah, I'm hooked....*sigh*.
Great post, I can especially relate to your Mazda point! Now, what did you find after looking at 5000 pennies? Post a pic or two!
better than being hooked on blackjack.... i add up cars license plates and try to make them equal 21..
When you "want to believe," then your hooked. In the 80's I thought I was a cleaver coin investor. I dreamed once about the Terminator holding out a hand full of silver dollars or crowns. He said: "dollars anyone?" "Oh yes l'll some." And then he bounced me off every wall in my apartment until I woke gasping for air. I did not see this as a bad dream. I want to believe. I saw it as the 1979-80 bull market saying: "I'll be back."
