Spare Change

I knew a Californian once, one who had settled in England, who I fell to discussing drinking habits with.  In addition to his incredulity that the products of Messrs Gallo should be treated as fine-wines rather than the brown-bag juice that they really were, it was clear that by his San Fran lights pretty much everyone in Britain was, at the very least, a borderline alcoholic whereas I maintained that the bulk of them were pure and simple Drinkers and that there was a difference.

Similarly, I have been pondering the difference between a bibliophile and a biblioholic.  It comes down, I think, to the number of ‘units’ in the To-Read pile.  While a Bibliophile might have the occasional binge, the average size of their To-Read pile remains at a sensible and decent level. Say a dozen books or so.   A biblioholic, on the other hand, is a compulsive purchaser and has an ever growing To-Read tower, one that they will never, can never, get to the foundation of.

I prefer to count myself among the former.  Very occasionally I do actually get to the bottom of the pile and there are times when I really don’t have anything new and unread in the house.  Admittedly this doesn’t happen that often but the fact that it does and that I can consider myself a maintaining ‘phile is in large part due to avoiding impulse purchasing on Amazon.

It is far far too easy to get caught up in a flurry of enthusiasm after reading a review, or whatever, to begin clicking away and thus stir drones-unknown in some far-flung warehouse to picking and packing and despatching.  Indulge in these high-jinks as often as twice a week and, boy, that pile is going to grow.  So, unless there is a rare and genuinely compelling reason as to why a book must be bought right now, I tend to restrict myself to the vicarious thrills of adding items to my wish-lists, which do grow to inordinate length, and just have two or three binges, benders, or sprees of bulk buying per year. 

Which isn’t to say that I don’t buy books between times – I certainly do – but I don’t tend to buy them by the barrow load.  It’s like this:

I don’t tend, when I prepare to go out on a morning, to bother with too much small change about my person and at the end of the day, when I get back home, I generally dispose of what shrapnel I have accumulated into a couple of pots: one for 1,2,5p pieces and another for 10and 20ps.  When the former builds up to sufficient bulk I usually give it over to a local hospice, thus salving my charitable conscience.  The latter, on the other hand is my binge-fodder. 

 

Getting from pot to letter-box used to involve bagging the coins up into £10 worth of 20ps and £5 worth of 10ps, lugging them off down to the bank and handing them over the counter to the cashier who would dutifully weight them and credit my account accordingly.  Over the least tow or three years, however, I have experienced an increasing degree of resistance from the cashiers themselves and the general-factotum staff loitering about in the bank’s lobby to performing this service.  Rather, they have been very insistent that I should take myself off over to a machine that you tip the coins into and which weighs them and credits them and provides a receipt without any need for all that nasty inefficient human  intervention business.

At a mechanical level this all sounds sensible enough, especially if it offers an escape from ten minutes tedium in a queue.  In practice, I find that it takes the machine two or three times as long to do the work as it would a human cashier since said machine will only process so many coins at once and obliges you to navigate back down through four levels of the menu hierarchy for each batch.  It’s a minor irritation that the machine also has something of a penchant for always rejecting a handful of perfectly sound coins, seemingly at random.  The major issue, of course, is that I cant actually rely upon the machine being in ready and working order when I get there so I still have to bag the flaming coins up in case the cashier, reluctantly admits that I have no alternative but to take them to the counter.

This might all sound like the grumblings of a grumpy old early middle-aged man but there is a moral aspect too.  ATMs apart, I do have a prejudice against self-service in banks and, more specially, supermarkets.  Firstly, because the burden of the labour is shifted to me without any benefit that I can see apart from fractional time-saving.  Secondly, because I don’t feel that it is much of a great leap forward to further the profits of the banks’ and supermarkets’ share-holders by doing away with what are effectively entry-level jobs done, in the main, by women.

I should confess that this prejudice is reinforced in supermarkets by the fact that, on the evidence of the few occasions that I have allowed myself to be cajoled or bullied down the self-service route, the machines have a personal animosity towards me and my shopping that ends up with me getting red-faced, sweaty and cross and humiliatingly seeking assistance.

 

But, though I do still resolutely queue in Tesco or Sainsbury for the remaining manned check-outs, I have all but given up in the bank.  The last straw was when I refused to allow the cashier to usher me off – on the basis that she could do the work faster – and she, very reluctantly and as slowly as possible, got the scales out and weighed the coins and then tried to keep me at the counter by trying to bully me – I use the b-word deliberately – to take the time to compare my current insurance products with those that the bank was keen to offer.  I felt rather less committed to job-retentention after that encounter and now, invariably and dutifully, head straight for the machine, though I do feel dirty and diminished for giving in to corporate diktat.

Anyway, I got up bright and early a few weekends ago, did the bagging up (just in case), hauled the whole load off down the hill into town and to the bank, where the machine took three goes to process £74.20 (80p being humorously rejected) and after a visit to the barber and a stop for a coffee, came back home and got busy frivoling*, the last fruits of which have dropped through my letterbox today and built my To-Read pile back high.

*Frivoling (verb)- to spend money frivolously.