Funny Money

One of the most difficult things to adapt to is the US currency. Known throughout the world as the greenback, presumably because it has a green back, it should more properly be known as the greeneverything.

The US dollar is perhaps the most boring and user unfriendly currency I have ever encountered. It's all the same size. It's all the same colour. This makes it simultaneously impossible for blind people to negotiate and extremely difficult even for people with perfect vision. Such thorough inconvenience from one of the great currencies of the world simply cannot have been an accident. They did this on purpose. Admittedly they are trying to make some improvements. There's now a little blush of a sort of pastel orange on part of the background of some new notes. But you have to take the note out of your wallet and look at the middle to see it, and they're still all the same size. I wonder why they bothered.

Even the units of currency are weird. You can't buy anything for less than 25c and yet they persist in having coins of the tiniest denominations. The unfortunate person forced to spend this currency quickly collects great piles of 1c "pennies" and other useless change because the various taxes ensure that all total costs end up being something like $23.82. I'm sure that is the real reason the USA developed a strong culture of tipping. They just don't want to have to carry the change.

I'm also having a certain amount of trouble understanding the names of the units of currency. Let's consider the nickel. It's worth 5c and is made out of something called Cupro-Nickel. I was willing to see the logic of the name until I realised that the dime, quarter and half-dollar are also made out of Cupro-Nickel. I first assumed that the name was a historical artifact, until a quick trawl of the website of the United States Mint informed me that although there was a period during and after the civil war when the coin was minted from Copper-Nickel, the name "Nickel" actually dates back to a time when the 5c coin was made out of silver. At this point I gave up trying to understand.

Patricia, Dad and I tried to explain to a token US citizen (Marcus) the serious limitations of this currency. Despite being a plainly intelligent and charming specimen of the type, Marcus demonstrated an astonishing resistance to reason. I can only put this down to nationalistic brainwashing from birth having convinced him that any criticism of the US currency is tantamount to treason. Astonished by his determination to defend his dollar against overwhelming odds, I put my money where my mouth is, and slapped some Aussie dollars on the table. Marcus struggled valiantly, although increasingly weakly as I pointed out its security features, the benefits of plastic over paper money, the variations in size and colour for the different denominations, even the sensible strategy of having the 5c coin as our smallest unit of currency. The day was surely ours when Patricia raised the stakes. Marcus finally surrendered, without ever admitting defeat, when she pulled out some Costa Rican currency and found it superior to the US dollar.