11 dollar Cokes

After not sleeping well last night, I found myself needing caffiene around the middle of my afternoon class today. So during our 6 minute break, I headed downstairs to grab a Diet Coke. Usually I just visit the vending machines since they are 9 cents cheaper than buying them in our little cafeteria thing, but since all I had was a 20, I went ahead and bought one from the cafe, got my change, shoved it in my wallet, and went back up to class. Later at dinner, I reach into my wallet and find that I only have 9 dollars instead of 19. The new chick at the register shorted me $10. This revelation, much later in the day, only served to piss me off, and I was still griping about it when I got home an hour later.

[As a sidenote, it's not difficult for me to know exactly how much money I have on me, because family tradition dictates that we never have more than about $30 cash on us at any time. We're a check/debit card family. One winter our neighbors shoveled our driveway, and when we went to pay them we could only scrounge up $8.75 total from the 5 of us. So when $10 is missing, I know it.]

I told my mom about my monetary loss, and then all the sudden she got this weird look on her face. She stood up, walked over to her purse, and counted out her money. I wondered what the heck she was doing, until she looks at me and tells me that she too was shorted $10 by the cashier at Wendy's. She said she didn't think to count her change, but later thought something was odd when she went for money for something else and only had 7 bucks.

Finding this a bit odd, I asked her when she was at Wendy's, and she told me about 4:45. Which is really eerie since my shortchanging occurred at 4:30. Coincidence?

The sucky part is that I'm not back at school till Wed, so when I go to tell them that I was ripped off, they're going to look at me like I'm crazy. Though if they keep their drawer right they should find that they were $10 over at the end of Mon. night. Regardless, I'm getting my $10 back whether they hand it over to me, or I extract it in plasticwear and napkins (which they charge us 10 cents a piece for if no purchase) over the next year. I'll leave it up to them which way they think is easiest.