First off, I went to the dentist’s today. After my cleaning, I was waiting for the real dentist to come in and make sure the hygienist had cleaned my teeth properly, and it was taking a while. She offered me a magazine, and I told her I’d pass. A couple more minutes went by, so I went up and looked through the magazine rack.

It only occurred to me afterwards that it probably says something about me that I moved Sports Illustrated out of the way to reveal Worth magazine, and that I found the article inside about family businesses increasingly being taken over in the rush of private-equity M&As to be fascinating reading. I was disappointed when the dentist came in before I got to the other article I wanted to read, about how Native Americans are investing profits from casinos into a suddenly-very-diverse range of businesses. (It seems like there’s some racist assumption underlying that? I’d have been able to tell you if there was one in the article, if only Dr. Las [not her real name, but all she was identified to me as] hadn’t been so speedy with whatever it was that was keeping her from seeing me.)

Later on (post-dentist), I was counting a bunch of money. We had a new ‘pack’ of 100 $1 bills, but I needed a couple, so I had to remove the band from them. If you’ve never seen a stack of new bills, it’s really something you should do. (Maybe drop by your bank and ask to withdraw $100 in new 1’s. It’ll be worth it.) First of all, they don’t feel normal. We’ve all gotten a nice crisp $20 from the bank, but pulling money out of a bank-packed stack [not meant to rhyme] is entirely unlike that. It’s even nicer. You hold it in your hand, it the feel is just… strange. It’s almost powdery, and pretty rough. As you try to take one bill out of the pile, you’ll realize that it’s very hard to take just one. Unlike potato chips, it’s not because they’re so good, but because they’re practically cohesive. (When counting new 1’s, I basically ‘grind’ it between my fingers because, more often than not, I’ve picked up two or more without meaning to.)

So at the end of the night, I had to count some unknown quantity of 1’s. I had 11 ‘old’ $1 bills that I had taken in, and some unknown quantity of new bills. I bemoaned the fact that I was about to have to count what was probably $75+ of them, which would be incredibly tedious. But then I remembered the other neat quality of brand-new bills: they’re sequentially numbered.

So I looked at the last three digits on the top bill, subtracted it from the last three digits of the top bill, added one*, and knew how many there were.

I wonder if I can start requesting that the bank give me only new, sequentially-numbered bills. But bank tellers, like chefs, are probably people you don’t want on your bad side. Especially the passive-aggressive ones.

* Because 700-699 = 1, but you have two: 699 and 700.