Pennies From Heaven

Question, what is your time worth? What is the time you save buying salad in a bag instead of chopping and slicing up a salad from scratch worth? Besides knowing you won't cut your finger and bleed all over the carrots, is it worth buying that bag of possibly listeria contaminated salad fixings? I say yes, it most definitely is worth it. Besides, a little sickness from bad romaine would help move along that extra weight I've been trying to shed. I always look for shortcuts, especially now that I'm of an older age. Not that much time left in my life to spend it screwing around when you can get somebody else to do the dirty work.

I have on my desk a coin sorter. You drop the coins in the top and they roll down into the correct cylinder. Pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters. Slugs and Canadian coins get spit out onto the floor. I used to go through the sorting process every couple of months. It helped offset the cost of vodka. However, it was a tedious process. You have to slowly pour the coins in because the thing can't handle it if you just dump them. Then you have to slide the coins out of the cylinders, into paper sleeves. The bank or grocery store won't take them unless they are packaged. Unfortunately, since we moved to Chicago, I stopped doing all that stuff. Instead I've been dumping loose change into a bowl. That bowl got filled, so I started dumping the change into another container. That is over three years of loose change. Now I am up to my tits in coins. So I guess it is time to take it all to the grocery store and dump them into that machine they have there. It counts your money and gives you a receipt that you then take to the service counter. That's where you get your money. Not all of your money, but most of your money, minus ten percent. The people who own that machine take ten percent, like a Hollywood agent. At this point I am fine with that, because it would take me a couple of hours to sort and package all that money. That is time that I value at... let's say, fifty dollars per hour. Not that anybody would hire me at that rate anymore, but in my mind that's what I'm worth.