As far a frozen pizza goes, you just don’t want to go there!

I guess I really need to buckle down and get all the paperwork done and get our taxes filed since we only have a few days left to do it in. I really hate doing our taxes and each year I seem to procrastinate right up to the deadline which really drives the wife crazy. I guess it all stems back to the day when I knew I had to send a check in and didn’t want to part with my money until the very last moment.

The second instance is when my niece left her rent money, which was in cash, in her purse at work. The employees have to share lockers, so several people had access to her purse during the day. Her money went missing, and so she claims that she has no rent money. I cannot understand for the life of me why anyone would leave large amounts of cash in a shared locker at work. Why she did not keep the money in her pocket, or in her locked car stashed under the seat or in the trunk or glove box I have no idea at all. It was hard biting my tongue on that one, I’ll tell you that!

I realize that I’m way past the age to care about prom dress shopping, but I like to put myself in my prom-going shoes to help my daughter some. Prom is a much bigger deal now than it was back when I was in high school. I guess that I shouldn’t be that surprised about it because there are so many things that are made specifically about prom and TV and movies make it into a much bigger deal than back in my day. It gets me a little excited too so I’m having a lot of fun helping her pick out all kinds of prom stuff.

I’ve been doing a fair amount of research to help her pick out some prom trends for this year and when I was doing that I saw some bankrupt alternatives online. I hadn’t been looking for them, but I thought that I could really use them with all of my credit card debt, so I’m going to check them out.

I’ve already seen all types of gorgeous dresses, but I’m really supportive of a cocktail length dress and awesome shoes instead of a floor length gown. I think that the shorter dresses tend to cost a little less anyway.

Before leaving the house, I looked through all the loose change for any wheat pennies and any other unusually old coins. I found 6 wheat pennies and set them aside. Then I carried the jar out to the truck and away we went.

When I got to the bank the teller was not happy at all to take my jar of loose change. She made no effort her hide her disgust with having to handle my coins for me. First of all, she asked me why I hadn’t sorted and rolled all the coins. I told I though the bank had a machine to do that. She said, “No – not at the branches.”

She went into a back room and came back out with a large ziploc type of bag. Opening the bag, she turned my mason jar upside down and dumped all the coins in it. Then she asked me for a deposit slip for my account. I was surprised that she asked for that – I wanted cash back for my coins. Again, with great disdain, she said, “No – we don’t do that at the branches.”

Unless I wanted to drive all the way downtown to the main office with my jar of coins, my only choice to be rid of the loose change was to give them my coins with a deposit slip, and wait for them to send the bag of coins to the home office where someone would dump them into a coin sorting machine, add up the total value of the coins, and then credit my account with a deposit. And that it would take 3-5 business days for the deposit to be credited to my account for me to be able to withdraw that money.

I’m sorry, folks. This is just crazy to me. Its not a lot of money and its not an urgent matter to me. But my coins are legal tender and I took them to my bank where I have done business for over 14 years. You would think that the least they could do is exchange coins for dollar bills and not take your money for 3 – 5 business days before you can get it back.