Sally and the Money

I was making a deposit for the Prince Street Home and School at ScotiaBank in Charlottetown this morning. The deposit included some cash – the proceeds from our Christmas raffle than I’m woefully late to deposit – and as I watched Sally, my friendly and helpful teller, count out the paper money I noticed that she was splitting it into two piles.

I asked her what the piles meant and she told me that the one on the left was for money that was “all done” – off to be destroyed, I assume, in some federal government money furnace somewhere.

I asked her how she decided which bills went into this pile and she said it’s entirely subjective; she showed me a bill that was “on the edge” that got to live another day, but said that it was close the end of its run.

I’d assumed all of this was done robotically by some centralized money scanning bot; it’s nice to know that these decisions about which bills live and which bills die are still made by real human beings.