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Okay, so Jerry White, I saw this article you sent me. This is great! "Penny Offense: Man
fined for paying fee in pennies". Yeah, he got fined for paying a fee. This is the sort
of story that makes everybody smile a little bit because we've all been there. We've been
treated unfairly and we comply to the penalty, but we do it in such a way that causes someone
to get it. You know? [Right.] We stick it to them, as it were. I think that's kind of
funny.
You know as I told you, I had gone to the emergency room last Thursday, and when we
got done with this 3 1/2-hour visit, as it turns out, we had a humongous bill, I mean
just a very expensive bill. And currently we don't have insurance. So, I mean, I'm talking
multiple thousands of dollars. So, I can kind of relate in terms of seeing a large fee and
then wanting to find some way to exact some vengeance. It sounds, it looks like he only
had to pay $25 to the medical clinic.
Yeah, it sounds like your saying he's being petty because it's such a small fee.
Yeah, maybe so. I don't think I would do anything similar to this, but it is sort of humorous
to observe it. It reminds me of "Everybody Loves Raymond". There was an episode where
Raymond was relating a story to his wife about how his father used to go through the toll
booth and sit in the line, and the people behind him were honking, and then he would
shout out the window, "Pennies are money!" You know?
It's traumatic for the kids in the background. They're all embarrassed. Yeah, exactly! It
also brings to mind another question of whether or not pennies are valuable anymore, so to
speak. You know, they're a penny, one hundredth of a dollar, but they're not useful. It just
bogs down time and creates a big lag on everybody's time and energy. It's a big inconvenience
to handle pennies nowadays. Virtually nothing is worth a penny.
I'm scrolling down looking at some of the comments, and it goes both ways. One person
says, "If pennies aren't legal tender, arrest the treasury department for making fake money."
That's good. I figured someone might get mad for having this guy arrested for complying
to paying the bill. He did not break the law by being a jerk. Who cares? You know?
Here's another comment: "We work for pennies, so why can't we pay in pennies? At least the
man was trying to pay his bill." [Nice!] It says that "West isn't alone in the ranks of
'penny-protesters'." That's the person who perpetrated this terrible crime. "A wise guy
in Frederick, Maryland showed up at the County Clerk's office last summer with bags of cash
to pay off his tax bill with $966.86 in change." He just walked in with a big bag of coins
and almost a thousand dollars in change. "And a New Jersey school district a few years back
punished 29 students who paid for their two-dollar lunches in pennies, possibly as a prank with
two-day detentions." Now that's only two dollars, so that's not that much money.
No, that's ridiculous. I mean, who cares if they've got a little malicious intent. They're
complying with the expectation. And I think that's the whole spirit behind all three of
these people. They're following the letter of the law, but they're still able to lash
out at some injustice they see that they're getting.