Coin Jar

Another thing I helped my mom with this past weekend, in preparation for her move, was a glass jar that had been collecting pocket change for over 20 years. “Glass jar” is a bit misleading — it’s a glass water bottle, the kind that sits on top of the office water cooler. You know, the five-gallon thing (that’s 40 pounds of water) that nobody but you ever replaces when it’s emptied. Nowadays they’re usually made of light-weight plastic, but this is an old original (dated “1979” on the bottom) made of glass.

I remember this thing in my mom’s and step-dad’s bedroom from my teenage years. The level of coins has been slowly rising for these many years, and this weekend when I saw it, the coins were nearly up to the spout. I tried moving it, and the best I could do was slide it across the hardwood floor in my mom’s closet. It had to weigh a couple hundred pounds, and there was no place to grab onto it, just slick, round glass.

My mom didn’t want to leave it to the moving men to deal with, so we started looking at ways to get the coins out and into something(s) more portable. We put a short box on the floor and I tilted the bottle over to try pouring the coins out. It wasn’t working too well, as the coins were apparently comfortable in the bottle and didn’t feel like falling out. While we were trying to figure out how to coerce them into the short box, the bottle broke.

A five-gallon glass bottle breaking is not a good thing under the best conditions. Add in many thousands of coins pouring from the break, and you get a right mess. Fortunately most of the bottle broke into large pieces, but we still found lots of small shards and glass dust throughout the pile of coins. My mom gave me some thick plastic gloves to work through the coins so maybe I wouldn’t slice open my hands.

I wish I had taken a picture of the pile of coins because that’s just not something you see every day. The coins were spread out over about three feet square, piled up to maybe two inches high in the center. It made me think of a dragon’s hoard. I wanted to lay down and wallow in the change, but the risk of taking a glass shard in my gut held me back (I don’t have scale armour like tenfold shields).

We worked together for over half an hour separating coins from glass pieces, but we eventually got all the coins into 10 empty shoe boxes. We could only fill the shoe boxes about halfway because of the weight of the coins. I truly have never seen so many coins. We’re going to take them to a bank for sorting, and I’m very interested to know just how many coins there are.

* I had the first shoe box of coins sorted, and there was a total of 1,500 coins in that one box. If that’s an average per box, that’ll be 15,000 coins. — Exact total came to 17,397 coins.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com