Where's My Damned Quarter?

I blame myself.

One way to make money on the streets of Manhattan is to stick your fingers in every pay phone coin return you see. Now, this is back in the days before cell phones made phone booths virtually obsolete. It's also back when saying "stick your fingers in every coin return" wasn't such a hilarious thing to say. But back in the day, you can be sure that every homeless person, and my grandfather, was searching for forgotten change in the coin returns of various pay phones in and around the New York City area. Personally, I always came up empty in my searches. It was such an easy thing to do and you barely had to stop walking when you did it.

I wish I had written this last week.

Obviously, some searcher of loose change overestimated how easy the search is. Or maybe he got angry at not finding anything in the return. Either way, this incident could have been avoided had I written this earlier. Then again, would someone who could do this to a phone booth have access to a computer? Probably not.