free as in blog

It’s not real money laundering, but here’s what happened.

I was at lunch yesterday with co-workers Kris and Andy. Kris and I are out of cash and the place we’re at doesn’t take plastic. Andy gives me $20 to pay for Kris and myself to buy lunch and then it’s easier for me to pay Andy back, since I just give him a $20.

Today, Kris comes in and offers his $6 to Andy, who passes the money to me. I still owe Andy $20 and I forgot to go to the ATM.

I hate ATMs. In my case, I pay $.95 per withdrawal plus whatever the ATM fee is, usually $1-$2. So to pay Andy back, it’ll cost me another $2-$3, or about 20% of what I needed to borrow from him at the time.

Andy and I went to JP Licks today for a post-lunch coffee and brownie. I had cash for me today since I had the change from Andy’s $20 plus the $6 Kris gave me this morning. So I offer Andy a deal. I’ll pay him back his $20 now, but I’ll do it as a JP Licks gift card. I could then pay for the gift card with my debit card and not have ATM fees. Andy gets JP Licks whenever he wants and doesn’t need to carry around cash to do so. He agrees. I tell them I want a $20 gift card. They tell me if I get a $25 gift card, I get a free 1/2 pound of coffee. They have great coffee, so I agree. I give Andy the $25 gift card, Andy give me $5.

We’re now even and somehow I walked away from that entire deal with free coffee.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.