but I want it! (or: small change)

I've developed a really stupid habit at work that carries almost zero payoff for doing something that, if discovered, could cost me my job.

I steal pennies.

I don't mean to say that I plan on making myself wealthy by stealing pennies from work. The pennies I'm after are Lincoln cents that the US Mint stopped producing in 1959. They're called 'wheatback' pennies (or just 'wheaties') because the tail side face was two sheaves of wheat and the words 'ONE CENT' instead of the Lincoln Memorial. When the Mint stops making a certain piece of currency, it doesn't recall them--instead they remain in circulation and are still perfectly valid. In fact, every currency minted in the US at any point in its history is still legal tender, even when it's no longer being minted. And because coins are much more hard-wearing than paper money, they last decades and even centuries, which means that if you are sufficiently lucky and look hard enough, you can find coins that date all the way back to the Revolutionary War. And you could still spend it. I don't know why you would want to, since they all have a collector value many times their face value.

So anyway. I steal wheatback pennies at work because I collect coins and I think they're kinda cool to have, even though whenever I express surprise and excitement whenever a customer turns out to have a wheatback penny and doesn't have any idea why it's such a big deal.

My dad was the one who got me into collecting coins and he had an impressive collection of dozens of wheatbacks. (Including the rare steel pennies minted for a year in 1943 so that the copper could be used to manufacture the munitions needed for the war). He told me that when he was a teenager he used to go to the bank and buy sacks of pennies (banks will let you trade in any legal tender for any other legal tender, including pennies), something like 1000 of them at a time, and he'd comb through it for wheatback pennies before going BACK to the bank and re-depositing the pennies. He said that as time went by he found fewer and fewer of them and it was because people like us kept snapping them up out of circulation.

He's probably right.

The same goes for quarters from between 1976-1977 that also have a different design on them. They were made to celebrate the two-century anniversary of the Revolutionary War and instead of the eagle, there's a minuteman playing a drum. Which is why they're called 'drummer quarters', Coin collectors sure are an imaginative bunch when it comes to names, aren't they?

When I can, I replace it with my own money, but for the most part I'm not especially worried that someone might see my register being off every now and then by a few cents and conclude that I was stealing pennies. For one thing, who would steal a sum of money that small? This is something that happens maybe once every week or two so I don't think it's consistent enough for anyone to get suspicious.

If I get caught I would probably be in big fucking trouble.

But I really, REALLY want those wheaties.

It bears repeating that impulse control is NOT one of my strong suits.