Here’s a random story about an equally random event in my life…
Last night I went to a local restaurant with my fellow blogger Fred, after placing my order I dug into my wallet and produced a ten dollar bill, I then handed it to the cashier who cast a rather suspicious glance at the bill and then at me. Saying nothing, but still giving me odd looks, she handed me my change of $4.78 and informed me my number was 78 and it would be called shortly.
As I proceeded to fill up my cup with pop, I glanced back at the cashier who was frantically scribbling on my ten dollar bill with one of those markers where the ink is supposed to change color if the bill is counterfeit (does that work on older bills?). Seemingly unsatisfied with the results she hastened over to her coworker and asked in a hushed tone “Does this look real?” while I couldn’t manage to make out his response, it must have been in favor of the bill being real, since they didn’t call the cops or anything.
As near as I can figure ignorance is the primary reason for them thinking it was fake, but I suppose it was a fairly honest mistake seeing as the ten dollar bill in question was a surprisingly crisp and new looking Series 1990 bill. And even though it was the first of its kind to feature modern anti-counterfeiting measures like microscopic printing around Hamilton’s portrait and a plastic security strip on the left side of the bill, the 1990 series looks nothing like the last two revisions of the bill (1999 and 2006), and again it was ridiculously new looking for a bill that was somewhere between 10-18 years old, so I guess I can’t fault them too much.
In case you’d like to see the last three revisions of the bill in question, there’s a picture after the jump.