Money Memos: Jumping Jeffersons

Well well well, welcome back my fine fellow pecuniophiles. Yes, I made that up. No, I don’t know why there isn’t an official name for people who are addicted to money. Catchy words aside, I recently came into a rather large supply of bills and they’ve got some very interesting qualities I’d like to share with you.

You may remember my first post about my pet project of collecting defaced dollars, but if not I encourage you to refresh yourself by reading it here. I’ll wait for you to finish, I like to think it’s fairly amusing (at least my mother and co-workers tell me so).

All done? Excellent. Today I want to show you all one of my favorite subcategories of Money Memos: the “Where’s George” variety. The website www.wheresgeorge.com describes itself as a “Currency Tracking Project.” On the homepage you can type in the unique serial number found on every piece of American paper currency and it will pull up a list of every location that another person has typed that serial number in before. This allows you to see the many locations around the country that that very bill you hold in your hands has been. It’s actually pretty cool and I encourage you guys to try it, if you haven’t before.

Now obviously not every bill will pull up its history, after all there’s over 1.31 trillion dollars in circulation at this moment, just in bills. That adds up to quite a large stack of cash.  If that amount in $1 bills were stacked end on end, they would cover the distance of more than one quarter the way from here to the moon. Outrageous. Clearly, even if not every bill has the value of $1, it would take us quite a long time to catalogue every bill in the Where’s George database. So how do you know which ones will have a history on the website?

Conveniently, currency tracking enthusiasts will stamp, write, or otherwise deface a bill with their website’s name to let you know that it has been entered into the system before. There are several official stamps that allow you to quickly and easily mark a bill to let the world know that this bill is being… watched.

Once the stamper enters the bill into the database, makes a note of its condition and where he or she set it loose, the game is on. They will wait patiently for someone to come across it and be curious enough to type the serial number into the website and see where it came from. The results are sometimes surprising, other times you’ll find that it started very near your location five years ago. Maybe you’ll learn of a new part of your state you’d never heard of (where even is Erin, Tennessee?). Nevertheless, it can be fun to do, and I keep a list of Where’s George serial numbers in my phone so that whenever I come across them, I can store them and save them for later.

Now since I deal with so much cash on a day to day basis, it stands to reason that I’ll come up against these bills sooner or later, probably more often than my traditional Money Memos. So imagine my glee when I discovered that the two groups were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Allow me to demonstrate.

Handwritten. The poor man’s way of marking his Where’s George collection. I’m not sure what website you’ll be directed to if you type in wheresgeoue.coa but I imagine it probably involves discreet monthly payments of $49.95. Not that I’ve checked. It might be quite a legitimate business site for all I know. Never mind that I’d list this bill as a Where’s Abe, unless George Washington suddenly got a sick beard and oversized mole without consulting me. Also he would have had to dig his way out of his concrete tomb that’s roughly the size of all the houses I’ve ever lived in put together.

But I digress. Handwritten Where’s George notes are less common than you might think, perhaps because if you’re crazy enough to mark hundreds of bills with your favorite website’s name you’ll probably just make the investment in actual stamps to save yourself the Carpal Tunnel. Also people will never find the right site if your handwriting looks like the cuneiform of an ancient Babylonian.

Honestly I’m not sure why this guy went to such great lengths to tell us what the website does considering the site’s name does a pretty good job of that already. What’s with the ‘@’ symbol anyway? The person went to all the trouble of writing a whole bunch of extra words and suddenly couldn’t write one more character. “Gee willikers, my arthritis is acting up again! Better use that fancy new symbol all the kids use these days to spare myself some pain while I write this overly-descriptive message on A COUPLE THOUSAND BILLS.” Sheesh grandpa, get a stamp already.

But by far my favorite (and the most depressing) George Memo I’ve found is this one.

I can picture it now: A very young boy learning about Where’s George for the first time, his eyes glowing with the fascination of a child who has yet to discover better things to do than eat worms and roam the outdoors with his dog. He decides to bypass that annoying system that uses the internet and start his own network of roaming dollar bills. “Plese,” he says. “Plese call, for I can track!” is his desperate plea for someone to let him know where his bill has traveled. I denied his request. I’m far more likely to cross reference his phone number with the directory of Wadley, Alabama (population 745) so I can nail the bill to his door and wait for him to get home. That should get an interesting reaction. I foresee him wetting his pants when he realizes some mysterious, possibly supernatural force has tracked him down to exact vengeance on him for defacing a dollar bill, but that might be too optimistic.

Yes, I might be sadistic, but Where’s George can be a fun little diversion if you find yourself in posession of one of these bills. Sure, the website looks like it was designed by a colorblind toddler but it’s functional and it’s cool, so it definitely gets my vote for first president *wink*

If you decide to hop on board with the craze and see how far your bills travel after you spend them, I encourage you to do so. Just please don’t write them by hand, or you’ll make me facepalm and say…

That’s all for this segment, folks. Now go out there and collect serial numbers!