A letter I sent to the fine people at Brown Bear Car Wash:

Hi there, Brown Bear!

I visited your self-serve location on 15th Avenue last week to wash the Barbie Dream Hearse. I put $5 into the change machine to receive the equivalent amount in quarters, but instead I received $4.75 in US currency and the coin in this picture:

The coin was later identified by several of my more worldly friends as a Thai baht. It was so similar to the US quarter, I didn’t even notice it at first.

Baht wait, there’s more.

I attempted to insert it into the car wash machine and it was repeatedly returned to me. It was then that I realized what the mix-up was all a-baht. I was still able to wash my car thanks to your fine establishment, baht I would like inform you of the discrepancy between the scanner in your change machine and the scanner in your car wash machine.

Unfortunately, I did not fair too well from this error. According to the current exchange rate, 1 USD is approximately 31 baht. This means the non-quarter that I received from your change machine is worth roughly 16 cents.

In exchange for the 9 cents I was forced to give you, I am interested to know how one machine was able to read the foreign currency, baht the other wasn’t. If you can give me some insight abaht how this happened, I will drop my claim for monetary damages as well as the terrible puns.

Thank you!

Kat Taylor
Barbie Dream Hearse