State shrapnel

I was at The Company Shop but the aisles had been replaced with a kind of ordering counter and café chair and table layout where you could order food and it would be cooked and served for you there and then. I ordered a chicken burger with chips but the woman serving gave me my change before I’d paid her. I tried calculating what she expected me to pay from the change given but couldn’t as it came to about 80p which was well under what I was expecting. The physical amount of change she have me was enormous too, intentionally using the smallest denominations possible.

I just wrote off the burger and decided to walk home as it was only a couple hundred metres just to deposit the vast amount of change. As I approached my door, my next door neighbour had a ramp to their front door and seemed to be moving things around.

At my house I struggled to open the door as it was really untidy, when I finally entered the house I dropped my pile of change on the worktop and gave it a look over. Some of the coins were thick gold coloured tokens in the shapes of US states with even stranger denominations like the shape of Florida as 30p and Michigan (complete with flimsy chain linking the two pieces) as 40p.