SINCE the barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan election is so near, the Pinoy can almost see it through the clear windows of the P1,000 polymer banknote.
A cashier may panic once he receives a not-so-perfect P1,000 polymer bill: The eagle is winking at me! The eagle lacks a feather! The eagle flew away!
So many rules to follow to keep the polymer bill crisp and new. I can’t even use a small coin purse anymore. Whew.
What if your usual Catholic Mass offering is P1,000 and the only bill in your wallet is the polymer version, and the collection basket is wrapped with the cloth that has this teeny weeny slot for coins. Talk of rich people problems. Haha.
I recently deposited a one-and-a-half-year collection of coins. Thanks or no thanks to my senior-moment shoulders that now prefer small bags, I always leave coins at home to avoid carrying around excess luggage. The moment I arrive home, off they go to the piggybanks. One and a half years later, those coins are as heavy as the chip you carry on your shoulder.
Counting those coins before depositing them made me wish I was counting P1,000 bills instead. The zeroes’ value depends on the position of the decimal point, which must be the thought bubble, too, of potential voters while waiting for perks before Election Day.
Counting coins was like meditating as I grouped them into ten pieces, and arranged those ten-piece stacks into rows of ten, so that each row had 100 pieces. If those were P1,000 coins, each row would have P100 thousand! But here’s the Realization 101. With the highest coin denomination at P20, the most I could get out of a row was P2,000.
Except for the P20 coin, all the other coin denominations look the same, and the only way to tell them apart is through their sizes. But I’m always confused when it comes to the P1, P5 and P10 coins. I have to check out their numbers to make sure I got them right.
Posts on Facebook have been busy reminding us about days: National Lipstick Day on July 29; International Friendship Day, July 30; Happy Girlfriend Day, August 1; International Beer Day, August 4; National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day, August 4; National Sisters Day, August 6; International Cat Day, August 8; Book Lovers Day, August 9; Lazy Day, August 10. And there’s the National Dako’g Agtang Day on August 3—I don’t know if that’s official.
I began to wonder if there’s a day for coins. And there’s two! Flip a Coin Day on June 1, and the National Coin Week on the third week of April.
Whose “national” are these special days referring to? I have no idea. But I’m sure the National Dako’g Agtang Day is for the Bisaya only.
These “days” are meant to encourage you to spend: buy lipstick, buy a gift for a friend, buy a gift for the girlfriend, buy beer, buy chocolate chip cookies, buy a gift for your sister, buy a gift for the pet cat, buy a book for the book lover, go to a resort where you can be lazy, and have a new haircut with bangs to cover up the dako nga agtang. Hmmm. You’ll need another one-and-a-half-year collection of coins for that.
