I am not going to say we were in the middle of nowhere, but after hours of driving, my son and I stopped at one of the few places to eat we had seen after miles of driving through nowhere.
I ordered the meals and then handed the lady a $20 bill. She took her “Is it real money” pen out and marked it to make sure it was real. I was surprised because usually these pens are only used on 50 and 100 dollar bills. It was real, so we got to eat.
We finished eating and thought we would get an ice-cream cone to go. I asked the lady whether the “ice-cream” was “ice-cream” or yogurt. She had a puzzled look like I had just ask her to divide 3245 by 13 in her head. She then pointed to the soft-serve machine and said, “It comes out here.” Not wanting yogurt and not wanting to insult her, we just got one ice cream for Jeremy. I handed her a $5 bill. Out came the “is this real money” pen.
The lady gave us three one dollar bills in return. Jeremy was amazed to see her testing the authenticity of the $5 bill until he looked at the one dollar bills and saw they too had been checked with the special pen.
When we got back into the car, I told him the rest of the story.
When the lady first checked my $20 bill, I made a comment about how people are testing everything these days against being a counterfeit. She replied, “Yea, they are even making counterfeit one dollar bills.” She paused and then added, “I got in trouble last night with my manager for taking a counterfeit one dollar bill.” (Did I mention we were in the middle of nowhere?) I then joked, “Well, at least they are not making counterfeit quarters.” She replied, “Yeah, Change Rules!”
We soon got to our motel. Jeremy tried to use his ABC player on his IPad, but it wouldn’t play. The warning came up and told him that he appeared to be outside of the United States or its territories.
Yes, we knew. We were actually in the Twilight Zone.
Lonnie Davis
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