A Penny Found

I went into the men’s room at work last week and as I went to do my thing, I noticed there was a penny in the urinal. It didn’t disturb me or gross me out, but it did make me stop and think. My thought process went something like this:

“Why would anybody drop a penny into the urinal?”

“Is this supposed to be funny? Because if it is, I don’t really see the humor.”

“Is this supposed to tick off the cleaning crew because they’ll have to get the penny out?”

“Is someone going to check every so often and see if the penny is still there?”

“Why would anybody drop a penny into the urinal?”

By then I was about finished what I had gone in for and probably thought a little too much about it. Here’s the sad part about all this: I’ve looked in that urinal every day since, just to see if it was still there. For those of you who can’t stand the suspense, the penny is still there, with poor Abe lying face down at the bottom. It bothered me that the penny was still there after more than a week, not because someone is wasting money (hey, it’s only a penny), not because no one is removing said penny from the place where us men relieve ourselves, but because I couldn’t figure out why it was there in the first place.

So I did what most people do today, I Googled 'penny in a urinal'. To my surprise, there is a game people play with pennies and urinals. It used to be that people left it on the urinal and would see how long it took for someone else to take it. Then people started putting the penny in the urinal. I can pretty much guarantee that the penny in the urinal doesn’t get taken anywhere near as much as the penny on the urinal. Go ahead, Google it yourself and see what you find.

The whole coin in the water got me thinking about the library in the town I grew up in. No, people didn’t leave pennies in the toilets or urinals at the library, but they did have an area with fish swimming around, not a fish tank, but a mini-pond in the middle of the library. People used to throw coins of all denominations in there and it was very tempting as a kid to reach in and grab some change. It still looks pretty much the same today:

My wife has confessed that as a kid, she occasionally reached in and grabbed some change. And as I mentioned in this post, back in those days a quarter was all you needed to get a soda and a candy bar at the gas station near my house.

I always liked to read, so I’d go to the library with my Mom to get a couple of books. While I was downstairs in the Children’s area choosing my books, Mom was upstairs looking for something for herself. When I was done, and I was always done first, I would go find her and she’d tell me to go sit at a table or in a chair and start reading one of my books. Only I’d go sit by the fish (and the coins) and strategize on how to get me some money. There were two problems, however, that held me back. First, the fish freaked me out. They were big and in my overactive imagination they’d bite into my arm and pull me under the water. Second, there were a lot of adults around and they all seemed to be watching me, like there was a conspiracy to make sure no kid got any of their money. Needless to say, I never even got one penny out of the fish pond.

Needless to say, I’m also not going to get a penny out of a urinal either. At some point it will get taken out by someone. Maybe that’s why some bathrooms include a sign saying “Employees must wash their hands before returning to work.”