I am walking up our driveway as Deb pulls up and into the garage. She’s been helping a friend of ours (Nancy) pack up to move north. Nancy’s husband is already working up there, and has hours not conducive to providing a high level of assistance, so Deb is helping. (Also, Deb’s organizational habits match with Nancy’s. Nancy’s husband, bless him, gets distracted by repacking things he hasn’t seen in years².)

ME: Welcome home, honey bunches! Success?

DEB: Yes, it went very well! I think we will have everything good to go by Wednesday at the latest!

ME: That’s my Debster! And the movers arrive…?

DEB: Thursday.

ME: Okay. Oh, I just got the mail, and so you know, one of the two chairs for trash pickup on our neighbor’s curb across the street is now on our curb.

DEB: I could not help but notice. Who moved it?

ME: Me. He was there when I got the mail, so I offered to put it out as our trash. That way he doesn’t have to worry about the “only one major item per trash day” rule³.

DEB: You didn’t just grab it?

ME: Debster! One does not just steal someone else’s trash!

DEB: Uh huh. Tell me again where the globe came from?

Many years ago, in the town where I grew up, there was an annual “big stuff” trash day. Anything you wanted rid of, you put on the curb, and some time during the week the trash haulers would come get it. Unless, of course, some neighbor wandered by, thought, “OMG that is absolutely fabulous! What sort of idiot would throw that out?” and abscond with it. Something like that might have happened with the 1930s-era globe that has been in my possession since the early 1970s. In my defense, a large number of people have complimented me on the fine antique that it is.

ME: So Nancy is packing up just fine, eh?

By the way, the next morning, before the trash trucks rolled through, the chairs — from both sides of the street — had vanished. They looked to be in pretty good shape, now that I think of it…

¹I explained about that earlier:

Conversation with My Wife (151)

²Also, there might be occasional times where Nancy and Deb agree something is junk, and Nancy’s hubs might not agree. Better not to bother the poor fellow, eh?

³Sometimes the trash company is tough about the rule, other times not so much. Better to play it safe.

Chat with Deb—Trash and Treasure was originally published in The Junction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“I bet Elon and Thiel are crying in their beers!!”

Garith liked the way emails could capture Mike’s characteristic excited chatter.

“But really though, we actually have a real shot at this… Online payment is the future of commerce and we’ll be the ones printing the money. E-commerce will be huge!!! Great job in there today. NOW. LET’S. GO. MAKE. BIG. BILSKI!!”

Garith wanted to be excited. He WAS excited, but also more nervous than he’d ever been. The prototype he had pitched yesterday had been a bit of a sleight of hand. He had pre-loaded the shredder cache so that the machine didn’t actually have to shred the BUCKS as they fed in.

Shredding, of course, was easy enough, and worked perfectly well in his other prototypes. But for this demo, Mike had insisted on using the design mock as the prototype, saying that we had to show a product no bigger than a CD-ROM drive. Otherwise, he said, they wouldn’t be able to visualize how it would slot neatly into a Compaq Presario Desktop. He outfitted the prototype with a light servomotor to feed in the bill, and when the cache door opened, it looked like it had been shredded. He was sure he could figure out how to fit a durable shredder in by the time they shipped in six months.

Maybe he could, maybe he couldn’t — it would sell anyway. A paper slot on your computer that would allow you to pay for online items with REAL* paper money? Who cared how big it was?

*well, paper COMPUTERBUCKS fiat currency that could be purchased at any Walmart or Sam’s Club nationwide…

He kicked back in his chair and allowed himself a moment to dream as he reacquainted with their original product vision.

• Families huddled around a desktop, eagerly shoving BUCKS into their computer to play arcade games…
• Senior citizens smiling dentureless with delight at how well the COMPUTERBUCKS cash slot was able to read the crumpled up BUCKS they liked to keep in their shoes.
• His wife sitting in their home computer room, looking glamorous with her sun hat and shades on, pushing COMPUTER BUCKS into the BUCKS slot on a luxurious cyber-shopping excursion.

And all without the risk of identity theft, which, as Mike had stated in his investor pitch, was estimated to be 98% likely for any given online credit card transaction.

A new name came to mind as he mused — THE CYBERBUCK??

COMPUTERBUCKS!!! was originally published in The Junction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.