blue cheese bit

i really need to clean off my desk…

…seriously.

it’s a problem of space. i love this desk. i don’t know what parts of it are for or do, but it wasn’t made for me; it was made for kramer. it’s arkansas walnut and angled like a draftsman’s table. it’s got a leveled out cutout in the middle of the top that was meant to hold the shoebox looking mac computers of yore…

but also perfectly holds a mid 2010’s dell laptop on a docking station rather nicely, which is it’s current filler since this ain’t 1983 and all.

(i fully acknowledge it’s also not 2016, which i think is when i got this laptop, but if it ain’t broke…)

but back to the space “problem” – if you give me room to clutter, clutter i shall. and this bad boy is all of seven feet wide (i’ve always claimed that, but i don’t know if i’ve ever actually pulled out a tape measure until now) and so it’s accumulated a great deal of stuff. everything from letter head from the coca-cola bottling facility that used to exist here in lockhart to a lemmy yard gnome to bose speakers to an ice cube in a lowrider funko to tools to a slayer backstage pass from 2003 to a lego boba fett clock to an oakley glasses stand, and amongst all the clutter i found what i find to be useless as fuck, a half empty pack of currency markers i have to take back to the shop.

we’ll touch on that two fold – first off, why i find them useless. assuming this doesn’t get read by the wrong people, i kinda helped kick start the bust of a counterfeit ring about twenty plus years ago. there was a convenience store i used to stop at (since demolished) on my way to work, and one time when i was in there grabbing a rockstar (yeah, that habit goes back to acl 2003 when charles attal turned me onto them since we didn’t really get to sleep working the festival) and i witnessed an argument between a clerk and a customer. the customer was trying to buy a pack of smokes (still around six bucks at that point) with a hundred dollar bill at 6:15am and the clerk wasn’t having it, saying they wouldn’t take anything larger than a twenty. the clerk was hispanic, the customer white. this seems trivial, but makes more sense in a second…a paraphrase of the exchange:

ma’am, i can’ take this…we don’t take anything larger than twenties right now…

what are you talking about? this is AMERICAN money to buy AMERICAN tobacco, which in AMERICA, is how we pay for things!

i understand that, ma’am, but we don’t take bills larger than twenties because of fake bills…

(she got cut off there)

WAIT A FUCKING MINUTE! are you trying to say i’m some kinda criminal? FUCK YOU! ya know what, you little brown bitch, just keep the fucking change – you need it more than me, and i’ll come back and talk to your boss later!

(she then grabbed her smokes, left the bill on the counter, and stormed out of the door – the clerk didn’t try to follow her or anything, which was wise)

i was next in line, stepped up, pointed at the hundred and said, “don’t touch it, but hand me one of those gloves you use for food prep”, which she did. i picked it up, held it up the light, and saw the inner stripe indicated it was a single. i looked by the register and saw a coffee mug with various pens and markers sticking up, including a few currency markers.

“lemme guess”, i asked, “you checked bigger bills with those markers?”

she nodded.

“all those do is verify the paper is federal rag paper, but they use the same paper stock to print a hundred dollar bill as they do a single”, i stated, “this is a single, they bleached out and reprinted to look like a hundred, so it’ll pass your little marker test, but it won’t work at the bank”

and that’s why i think the markers are worthless.

twenty plus years later modern currency comes with all kinds of hallmarks you can verify – lettering that changes color by angle, raised ink, hologram shit, the aforementioned stripe, watermarks, etc. this kinda bullshit with the bleached single is a big reason why all that shit is on there.

have you ever fed a bill into a machine and it didn’t take it? a corner was bent, or it was too worn, or too new, or whatever? well, a former co-worker took a hundred he got for a tattoo and tried to feed it into an atm and it didn’t take it, so he instantly assumed it was fake. told his girlfriend he’d gotten a fake bill from the shop, and more specifically from me.

she worked with us as well, so she told our boss. then it got to me and i called bullshit.

i check three points on a hundred dollar bill that counterfeiters typically can’t replicate – the liberty bell hologram, the raised ink on franklin’s coat, and the color changing “100” in the corner. all verifiable without having to raise the bill up to the light in front of the client (some take offense so i always did it AFTER they passed those three tests and the client was gone) so i knew damn fucking well i hadn’t handed out counterfeit currency.

he said “the bank wouldn’t take it”, which is a line that carried a lot more weight than it should. to me (and my boss, who’s the same age as me) that meant he walked into a chase branch, handed it to a teller, and a real person declined it and said it was a forgery. but that wasn’t the case – he had just tried to feed it into an atm with a bunch of other bills and that one had kicked back out. there’s a HUGE difference between those two scenarios.

because of the bullshit complaint, all of a sudden i was taxed with taking these useless markers around to all the shops, even though i told the boss they were pointless and explained why.

but now they’re finally off my desk, after a couple years of sitting (and the markers i took out have long since found the trash and to NO ONE’S surprise no more bad bills have been discovered). now to get to the rest of the clutter…