Where's Ornoth?

If you’ve spent much time with me, you probably discovered that I mark my paper money and track where it goes using the Where’s George? website. And you’ve probably asked yourself, “Why?”

There’s no good answer actually, other than boredom and curiosity.

In 2004 I was between jobs and had nothing better to do, and I remembered having seen one of the very first Where’s George? marked bills at work back in 1998. I thought it might be interesting to see where my cash went, so I registered and started entering the serial numbers of all the currency that passed through my hands.

However, I quickly learned that doing it ad hoc would be a huge pain. I found it much easier to make one trip to the bank every month or so, pulling out $200 in $1 bills and another $200 in $5s. In order to get more bills into circulation, I tended to avoid using $10s and $20s, but I did drop a fair number of $100 bills off at casinos!

Whenever I traveled, I’d spend the bills I’d entered in Boston, so that someone who found my bill in Las Vegas or Pittsburgh or St. Thomas could see where it had come from. Then I’d pick up more cash to bring home, since it would be equally interesting for people in New England to receive bills from faraway places.

Over the past ten years, I entered 17,600 bills, 95 percent of them $1s and $5s, totaling about $64,500 worth of currency. Most of those were entered in Boston or Maine or Pittsburgh, but I’ve entered bills in many other locations, including Las Vegas, St. Thomas, the Caymans, Puerto Rico, Korea, Scranton, and Boise!

Out of all those bills, 1,450 of them have been subsequently entered (1,600 times) by someone else, which is about a 9 percent hit rate. On average, I get a hit every other day. Since I don’t mark my bills very conspicuously, few of my bills get hit multiple times; only 14 of them have been entered by three different people after my initial entry.

My bills have been hit in every county in Connecticut and Rhode Island, but I still haven’t gotten the needed Martha’s Vineyard hit to complete my home state, or the one remaining (Coos) county in New Hampshire.

My bills have been hit in every US state except five obscure ones: Alaska, Arkansas, Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota.

Beyond our borders, my bills have been re-entered in Canada, Puerto Rico, the US and British Virgin Islands, Anguila, Bermuda, England, Ireland, France, Germany, the Philippines, Cambodia, and Australia (my farthest traveler went 10,500 miles to Melbourne).

My longest “sleeper”—a bill that resurfaces after a long time with no activity—was spent at a restaurant in Scranton in 2006 and showed up at a grocery store in the same town around Christmas 2013, more than seven and a half years later!

If you really want to know more, here’s a link to my Where's George? profile.

While all this was going on, I discovered that the most active Where’s George? users get together in regional “gatherings”. I attended a number of local meet-ups in the early years, and got to know Hank, the site’s irascible creator. But there haven’t been any gatherings in Boston for years.

Over the past six months, I’ve been looking critically at where I invest all my time, energy, and attention, and I decided to stop entering new bills into Where’s George? on March 25th, my tenth “Georgeaversary”. The date was convenient, and the decision pretty inevitable.

Why inevitable? Well, it’s like this… When you first start “Georging”, all kind of interesting things happen. The first time one of your bills gets “hit” (entered) by another person. Your first out-of-state hit. Your first hit in another country. Getting a hit in every county in a state. And so forth. But over time, those milestones become less and less frequent. And as I said, it no longer offers the social opportunities it once did.

Plus it’s a bit silly. It’s not the kind of hobby that would impress a girlfriend or your co-workers; yet it can be a rather difficult one to hide from them, if you ever go out to lunch together!

Ultimately, it came down to whether I was getting enough entertainment out of the hobby to make it worth the investment of time spent entering and marking bills… And in the end, that answer was unequivocal.

So now it’s on to other things.