Change

Someone needs to.

I can tell when our "Winter Visitor" season is starting by counting the number of Winter Visitor coins I receive as change when I conduct cash transactions. They increase substantially as winter approaches, and drop off dramatically when the temperatures start to rise and the local roads and freeways become magically unclogged and devoid of cars bearing license plates from exotic Vancouver or Alberta.

I suspect my northern cousins can likewise use coinage to tell when they see an influx of southern visitors -- either in the summer months or when a Republican wins the Presidential election.

This is why someone -- either the US or Canada -- needs to change. They need to change their change. The similarity in size, weight, and color of the various coins making up our respective dollars simply must cease. We must differentiate.

I'd like to see the US do this -- even with the addition of a touch of color to our paper money, our cash is dreadfully dull. Dull, flat, lifeless disks of base metal -- even the copper-esque penny dulls out rapidly. We tried to do something interesting with our dollar coin, but that never went anywhere.

Of course, the similarity means that the wealthy, retired senile sorts who can afford to have a home in the sunny Southwest when their igloo doors get iced over are easily confused, hence the uprise in Canadian coinage in my pocket. Seems my local shopkeepers figure to unload their foreign metal on customers, rather than risk the wrath of the boss.

So. We need to change. We should talk to the designers for Apple -- they keep coming up with eye-catching stuff for their products, maybe they can innovate some really cool coinage.

It is not as though the coins are worth anything, anyway, so we may as well make them as interesting as the toy prizes you can get in your Happy Meal.

TransformerCoins! Collect the whole set!