By Ken Rickard
Advertiser Staff Writer

I think it all started at the Burger King at the Oregon State University MU, where you could get a burger for 99 cents.

Oregon has no sales tax, so 99 cents meant you got a penny change when you paid with a buck. At the end of the school year, I was determined to pay for a burger with 99 pennies to get back at them.

I never did get around to that, but I did manage to amass a great amount of coins on my dresser.

For some reason, a lot of guys have a problem with carrying change. Most of my friends never have a quarter on them, but they do have a small fortune in coins at home.

You've probably stumbled across these treasure chests at their places. They usually have a container on the counter or on the nightstand to hold all the silver we collected during the day.

Sometimes it's a little dish that inherited the duty of holding coins, while other times it's some type of jar. My favorite type of coin holder is a dusty, 3-foot tall beer bottle replica in the corner containing enough specie to pay the rent.

I have, not surprisingly, a Superman piggy bank from the old WB store holding my metallic assets. (It was a gift ... no, really it was.)

Part of the problem is that we find carrying coins cumbersome. Our wallets don't have a place to hold change, so we just end up unloading them the first chance we get.

If you check our desks or lockers, you'll most likely find a pirate's dream, or even better, check the ashtrays in our cars for spare change. Thieves could probably be arrested for grand larceny just for stealing our ashtrays, let alone the cars.

Think about the last time you were behind some guy at the grocery store and the cashier asked him if he had a penny. We usually do that little slap move over our pockets before confirming what we already knew: "No, I don't."

I used to hand my coins to my ex, to the point where she started to complain because her coin purse got too heavy.

My only interest in change is to look at the back of quarters to see if I got a new state (Hey look, Missouri!).

The only place guys ever use change correctly is in the car at the fast-food drive-through. The time we have between the order speaker and the pay window is usually enough time to count out correct change.

And while we are in the car, we realize we have a chance to finally dump some of these coins so we'll count out as many pennies as we can to try and get rid of them.

I read somewhere that the government was thinking about getting rid of the penny because nobody found them useful anymore. They obviously haven't seen me at the Jack In The Box paying with three dollar bills and 32 pennies.

The Treasury also tried to give the dollar coin momentum with those golden Sacagawea ducats, but you know it was the bad habits of men that killed the comeback. We probably threw all of them in our coin piles and took them out of circulation.

Every few years, I roll my coins and put them in the bank. At my last deposit, I had about $100 worth of pennies.

But I didn't have change for the soda machine later. Guess I'll just start my collection for the next time.

Reach Ken Rickard at krickard@honoluluadvertiser.com.