Quarters and Candy

An interesting thing happened at the Hot Spot convenience store today (yesterday)

I was on my way home from work; I was hungry and thirsty. So I stopped in for my general standby - a bottle of Mello Yellow and a king size snickers. I was about to pay for it with my debit card, but saw I had some cash in my wallet.

I handed a $5 bill to the clerk and he gave me back my change, which included three quarters. As I start to walk away, I flip the quarters over to see what's on the back of them -- Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Missouri. I've been trying to find an Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah quarter since they came out this year. So I'm about to walk out the door when the clerk yells "Hold up, which states are you looking for?"

Huh?

His question piqued my interest. So I turned around and told him.

"I think I've got a Wyoming in here. Someone gave me one earlier," he says. He had noticed me looking at my quarters. Normally, I would find that kind of creepy -- and I still do, but his interest in the quarters had me interested.

He opens his register drawer, pulls out all the quarters, puts them on the counter, takes a roll out and breaks that over the counter, and we start going through them all.

No Wyoming, Idaho, or Utah quarters. So we struck up a brief conversation about coin collecting. He and I have both been working on the States of the Union quarter collection since it came out. Of course, I learned he's a lot more into coins than I am.

Neither one of us realized though as we were going through all these quarters that a lady with a little kid, who I'm assuming was her 5 or 6 year old son, had walked up behind me at some point with a couple drinks and a bag of Doritos in hand.

Suddenly her son says, "If you guys don't want all those quarters, can I have them?"

The clerk and I both raised our heads, looked at the little kid, and we and his mother all started laughing. The kid didn't find it very funny. "I could buy a whole bunch of candy with all those quarters," he said, now scowling at us.

His mother made some quip about him not eating the Halloween candy he didn't like, I thanked the clerk quickly, and left. I laughed about the whole thing as I got into the car.