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Friday, October 27, 2006

Think twice before you laugh...

Andrew and I are going to the movies tonight. We stopped by the dollar-theatre on the way home from work today. The only good things playing are Cars (which was saw in Jordan) and Superman, so we decided to go to Superman. I hadn't even heard of the other movies, but that's not saying much because I don't pay attention to such things.

So, between the two of us, we had about 60 cents, a credit card, and a check book. We got up to the window and there was this nice big sign saying, "Cash Only!" There was also a sign stating that there is an ATM inside so we decide to give that a try. It took us about 5 minutes to figure out how to use the ATM (we kept putting the card in upside-down) and when we finally got it to work a nice message popped up saying, "This will incur a $1.50 service charge on your account." We decided to go home and scavenge for change. I was not about to spend $1.50 in an attempt to spend $2.00!

We got home and opened up Andrew's "laundry fund" from his days of living at BYU. We had about $3.00 inside. We counted out all the pennies (75 cents), and added a bunch of nickels and dimes until we had two dollars. Then we grabbed a few more random coins just in case taxes were more than we thought.

We ran back to the theater and asked the guy inside if we could buy tickets. This guy possessed no customer service skills whatsoever. He grumped, "Come over here." And led us to the window whereupon we presented him with all of our spare change. I handed him 75 pennies and 5 nickles and said, "This is a dollar." As I transferred it to his hand a penny fell on the ground and Andrew said, "Now it's only 99 cents!" The guy didn't even crack a smile, so Andrew handed him the other dollar's worth of coins and we got our tickets.

I was looking at the tickets as we walked out of the theater. At the very bottom it says, "Price Includes $0.07 Amusement Tax." Did you know we pay an amusement tax? I wonder how much money I owe the government for all the times I've giggled without paying up...

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