A Penny Saved Is a Penny Earned — Sort Of

So I dropped my wife off at the San Jose airport early this morning for her trip to Ohio and subsequent job interview. I decided to be frugal and take a handful of penny rolls that I recently rolled up from a jar of spare change to pay for the parking. I guesstimated that I would need five dollars or so to pay for the parking while I saw her onto the plane (or at least through the metal detectors, now that only passengers are allowed to enter the terminals).

We did hit a snag or two, since we arrived two (yes, exactly two) minutes past the cutoff for boarding and they would not let her on the plane (major stress ensues!). After a moment of panicked terror, my wife called her company's travel broker and they arranged a different flight for her through another airline fee of charge (score one!). So I saw her onto her new flight and strolled out to the car, pennies in hand, ready to pay for parking.

I pull up to the parking window, and the guy says that it will be five dollars exactly (whew... since I only had those ten penny rolls). I start to hand him over the rolls, when he says to me, "You're gonna have to count those out for me."

"You must be joking," is my pseudo-calm reply. "Nope, I'm responsible for all the money that comes in here and you're gonna have to count them out," he says. "You're really joking, aren't you?" I reply, a little more desperately this time. "Nope," is his stoic answer. He then proceeds to have me count out ten entire rolls of pennies, ten pennies at a time, with an entire row of cars waiting behind me to flee the airport nonsense. The whole process probably took seven minutes or so, which struck me as a gigantic waste of everyone's time.

Several thoughts were going through my head at the time. For example: 1) "Who looks like a bigger ass-jack to the drivers in line behind mine? Me for bringing penny rolls or the parking guy for making me count them out?" 2) "Is he really required to have people count the coin rolls out to him, or is he just punishing me for paying with five dollars in pennies?"

I'm not sure there is a gigantic moral to this story, other than that I probably should have known better than to bring penny rolls for parking. I was just trying to save money so I wouldn't have to take out a whole $20 bill from an ATM. But, come on, did the guy really have to have me count them all out like that? They say a penny saved is a penny earned, but today I learned that ten penny rolls saved are a gigantic seven minutes wasted and a real mood-killer.