Cold Call

Something I never expected to write:

I got a call from the Secret Service yesterday.

The call concerned a $10 bill that was a little suspect. On a Monday, a week or so ago, I got the bill with some change during lunch. The next day, I went to breakfast, and the McEmployee thought the bill might be counterfeit. Some of the employees used a counterfeit bill marker to check it. They drew some really long lines on the bill, and they thought the bill was a fake, but I wasn't too sure of their assesment.

I took the bill to a bank branch, and they were really uncertain whether it was counterfeit, although they also seemed to think it was a fake. There's a certain irony here since the place that gave me the bill as change had received it from the bank branch that was telling me it was a fake. Their only course of action at that point was to give me a form to send it off to the Secret Service to determine if the bill was authentic or not, which I did.

Anyway, the call from the Secret Service was to confirm which branch had sent them the bill. They confirmed that the bill is authentic, and they're sending it back. I'm thinking, 'great, a bill that everyone thinks is counterfeit.' Maybe I could hold onto it for 44 years, and it will be worth something more than $10. It is a 1950s series bill, which might explain the confusion. Most of the current anti-counterfeiting measures have been put in place over the last 20-30 years. I really have no basis to make that last statement, but you could always read up on counterfeit bills on Wikipedia.

Well, at the very least, you've learned that the "original mandate [of the Secret Service] was to investigate the counterfeiting of U.S. currency--which [they] still do."