The last few days I’ve been counting change. I got into the habit of throwing my loose change into a wine bottle after working with my friend Tom (who used a larger container, a water cooler bottle).

Every year or so when we worked together, Tom would regale me with stories of wheeling his water jug down to the local bank and cashing in on his hoard of change - it sounded like such a ridiculously simple way to force oneself to save.

I’ve gotten through the quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies (still have the dollars to do) and was up to around $750. Last time I cashed out was about two years back over the holidays and it wound up going a long way towards making a nice Christmas present. This time around it will pay for a few trips.

Lately, I’ve had the time to wrap up a few loose ends - all too often there seem to be an abundance of loose ends (things undone) around here so, it’s very satisfying to see some of the long unfinished projects moving towards completion and getting crossed off my list.

As I had noted, last weekend I got around to turning in old plane tickets for credit. The poor ticket agent at the counter was so nice sorting through the horror of processing these old tickets I had - this must have been something like a ticket agents nightmare since one of the tickets I was cashing in was from ’94 and the other from ’96.

You can only do those kinds of things at specified times (since you have to go to the airport now and I imagine they don’t want you to clog up the processing of departing passengers). When I got there, the airport was fairly quiet. the airport in Westchester is small (one terminal/four gates) so, I was able to walk right up without waiting.

The woman (ticket agent) was so patient, it took her almost an hour to process the transaction. After I had been there about fifteen minutes another customer came up and was waiting to get something done. She had a little boy with her and he wasn’t terribly happy with having to spend such a nice sunny day accompanying mommy to the airport and standing around the check in area - of course he made sure everyone knew it too (there’s some amazingly disquieting noises a child can make when they’re bored or unhappy). I grew uncomfortable having to make someone else wait, and let the agent know if she wanted to I would be okay waiting while she processed the woman’s transaction but, the agent wouldn’t have any of that.

The woman waiting grew increasingly impatient, even more so than her little boy. She whipped out her cell phone and her daytimer and made a big show about what a busy person she was (there were a couple of stage whisper comments in her cell phone conversation and those big dramatic huffs). I don’t think it impressed the ticket agent and I found it a little rude. When the ticket agent did finally try to process her it appeared she had an even more complicated transaction to conduct than I did which involved calling travel agents, first class tickets and turning in other tickets. Real precious attitude she had going there. The airport is over near the Greenwich border and while I don’t think it’s right to make generalizations about anyone, she did have the reek of new money - probably a Lincoln Navigator waiting for her in the parking lot. If it were the eighties she could be a character from a Thom Wolfe novel.

Watching her just made me think about the times I have been impatient or boorish. I don’t think I would have stuck it out as long as she did, I probably would have just come back another time when I could get things done quicker. It reminded me I have to write an email to the people at the airline about how nice the agent was.