Trivial Pursuits: A fistful of quarters

Doing laundry at my house is always a profitable experience.

It’s like a treasure hunt, all the quarters and loose change I find at the bottom of the washing machine, on top of the dryer and in the depths of hampers.

Most of it goes into the household Mason jar of emergency money for car washes, parking meters or, if I’m really desperate, my caramel-macchiato-with-an-extra-shot-habit.

And most of the quarters and loose change – come to think of it, all of it – gets into the laundry by falling out of my significant other’s pockets.

Scooping up coins can be annoying, but mostly I’m baffled by the lack of concern for the monetary value to be had in the scattered change just sitting there, discarded and forgotten.

Last time I checked, quarters still spend, and four of them gets you a dollar. Eight of them gets you by with the Tooth Fairy when it’s nine o’clock at night and you don’t feel like going to the ATM for cash (which then requires breaking into smaller bills at a gas station, unless the Tooth Fairy decides to suddenly leave a $20 bill under your kiddo’s pillow, which just isn’t going to happen – not at my house).

While I am baffled by this to-heck-with-loose-change attitude, my boyfriend certainly didn’t coin it.

It’s like leaving the toilet seat up. It’s a guy thing.

This is why women are way more likely to pull out change at a check-out counter rather than break a bill and get a handful of change back.

To be fair, most men don’t carry pocketbooks with change purses. Whereas women have a designated place from which to produce that exact change at the register, men tend to keep coins in their pocketa, often forgetting it’s there – until it comes out in the wash.

Maybe it’s all a wash in the end, if all the change makes its way to the Mason jar and gets used from there.

Tonight, I collected $3.87 cents from the laundry room, and I’ll keep doing it – not only because it drives me crazy to see it everywhere – but also because it’s a small price to pay for the one you love.

Even if he is a man who sometimes forgets about the toilet seat.