Category: Blogging

Today while I was working, I opened a roll of quarters to make change for a customer and saw this odd quarter.  When I got a better look at it, I saw the date on it was 1898.  After I got off work, I asked my manager if I could exchange a new quarter for it and he agreed. If I wanted to sell it, I could only get $5-$10 dollars for it according to the sites I found.  I don’t have any plans to sell it.  I think it’s neat to have a 118 year old sliver quarter, so I’m keeping it.

On my tumblr I’ve written a little about the few “glitches in the matrix” I’ve experienced.  Most of them revolve around me knowing without a shadow of a doubt something and being told no you’re wrong.  It’s never major things like who’s the president or what month it is.  It’s things like what time does this store open or how long a season of a tv show was.  Mostly I just try to forget them or ignore them.  Sometimes it’s harder to ignore.

Monday evening I checked the picture of the schedule, on my phone, to see what time I had to be at work.  I saw 9:30 am.  I always give myself half an hour to get to work and an hour to get ready.  So I knew I should get up at 8 am.  I’m not a morning person.  Getting up before 11 am is not part of my natural rhythm.  Before I went to bed I set my alarm and because I wanted to make sure I looked at my schedule again.  9:30 am.

I woke up the next day, got ready for work, even took time to eat something, and walked to work.   I arrived at 9:10 am.  I don’t know if I left early or if I was unconsciously power walking but if I had left at 9 am I should have gotten to work at around 9:15 am.  That was the first weird thing.  I was let in by my manager, the store doesn’t open til 9:30 am.  She didn’t say anything to me other than “Good morning.”  I walked through the store to the break room.  On the way I stopped to check the daily line-up to see when my break was going to be.  I find my name and see it lists me as working at 9 am.

I head for the break room to clock in because apparently now I’m running late.  I clock in and check the schedule on the wall.  It too says I work at 9 am.  Someone most have changed the schedule without telling me, I think.  So I check the picture of the schedule on my phone.  It says 9 am.

I know I looked at the picture on my phone at least twice on Monday.  The second time I was very deliberately reading the time because I have made this mistake before.  I was looking at the :30 making sure it wasn’t :00.  I’m baffled by this ‘mistake’.

Here is where I give the evidence that mostly sinks my story:  The picture of my schedule is blurry.  The numbers are readable just not perfectly clear.  There’s a touch of blur but you can read 9:00 easily enough.  If you were checking the time carefully you wouldn’t think it read 9:30.

I now I will start to sound really weird:  I don’t remember the picture being blurry.  I read the time clearly on Monday and on Tuesday when I checked it again it was blurry.  Blurry in a way that might make me think I had just misread the time.  While writing this I looked at the image a few more times and noticed the blur isn’t across the entire image.  It’s a band of blurriness that runs straight over the row of my schedule.  The schedules above and below mine are less blurry.

It’s subtle.  The top of the image the farthest from my schedule is clear.  The picture of next week’s schedule I took at the same time is perfectly clear.  I normally retake schedule pictures if they look blurry, so why didn’t I retake that one?  I don’t know.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter, I guess.  Whether my schedule was changed through some sort of reality glitch or I just misread the time, it doesn’t make much of a difference.  The end result was the same: I was late to work.