a travelling dollar

Back in September (09.28.06), I wrote a post about a currency tracking project that I'd come across called "Where's George?". The basic gist is that people enter dollar bill serial numbers into the wheresgeorge.com database, mark those dollar bills with the wheresgeorge.com site address, and then spend the dollars in the hopes that someone else will enter them into the database so their "progress" can be tracked.

Over the course of a couple of weeks back in the fall, I entered 14 bills into the database. Because I didn't have a "Where's George?" stamp and I got tired of writing on bills in red pen, I gave it up. But lo and behold, I got an email yesterday saying that one of my bills had gotten a "hit" - after 234 days. Someone in Milton, West Virginia, had entered one of my marked bills. I Googled Milton and found a few stats on this little town:

- Location: Cabell County, WV, about 30 miles west of Charleston
- Population: Approximately 2,250
- Median age of residents: 39
- Racial distribution: 98.7% White, 0.7% Hispanic (Which still leaves 0.6%, or roughly 13 people unaccounted for. Go figure.)

A little silly to get excited about tracking a dollar, but it makes one wonder what the bill has been doing for the past 8 months. Has it changed hands a lot? Or did it sit in a bank or a cash register for a while? Who knows? But, for the moment, it's chillin' in Milton before moving on to its next destination.