Souvenir

The percentage of Canadian dimes in the New York State tollway machines in the Buffalo area was higher than the percentage of Canadian dimes in people's pockets, so the tollway people knew that people were using Canadian dimes deliberately, trying to rob the tollway of the .8 cents difference in their value. So they figured out how to make the machines know the difference between American dimes and Canadian dimes, and they upgraded the machines.

Bob Armbuster, a successful businessman who traveled to Canada a lot, was one of those people who had been using Canadian dimes in the machines. But Bob also traveled to Brazil a lot, and discovered that the new machines still couldn't tell a Brazilian dime from an American dime. Actually the Brazilian coin wasn't really a dime, but it looked like a dime and was the exact same size; when he used one, he saved 6.7 cents, a more sizable reward.

He smuggled dimes into the country in a hollowed-out statue of the Christ the Redeemer of Rio de Janiero; on one of his trips, he asked around about where he could find a hollow statue, and kept asking until he got just the right one. The coins fit in there easily without weighing too much. Once in customs, however, they actually opened it up, and he simply explained that he liked the coins and brought a whole bunch of them back for the little children in the classes he visited; they bought the story and let him bring them in. Once in the country, he'd use Brazilian coins in place of dimes at every toll machine and actually enjoyed going through the toll machine, knowing that he had something over on the toll association.

At the Buffalo Sabres hockey game it was common practice for irate fans to throw dimes on the rink when they were mad about a referee's call or they wanted to heckle an opponent's goalie. The dimes would melt the ice and become a hazard until the zamboni operator dealt with them; at that time they still didn't use cameras to figure out who was actually throwing them, but obviously the dime-throwers weren't the favorite fans of the team, the stadium, or the zamboni operators. Bob started throwing the Brazilian dimes, figuring that he was not only wreaking havoc on the team and its rink, but he was saving 3.7 cents with every throw. He was aware that he was probably giving Brazil and Brazilians a bad name in the Sabres' stadium, but he didn't care. He kept the dimes in a different pocket from the rest of his money and only used them when he needed them.

One time, though, he was getting a sausage and a coke and was short forty cents on a $5.40 bill; he accidentally pulled out the dimes from the wrong pocket and counted them out. Maybe the cashier saw the look on his face when he realized that he had the Brazilian dimes, because it drew her attention to the dimes and she looked at them, and sure enough noticed that they weren't American dimes; they weren't even Canadian ones, which were fairly common and usually accepted in such circumstances. She called her boss over and said, "Do we accept these?" innocently, and he, after observing them for a minute, said, "Hey, these are Brazilian coins!" in horror, as if they had been looking for the perpetrator of the Brazilian-coin crimes for months. In a panic Bob turned and fled, left his sausage and his coke, and left without even his five dollars; he missed the rest of that hockey game and a few others also, and that turned out to be a pity because the Sabres were at that moment doing a little better and actually winning a few games.

After that he rethought his strategy a little, and used them less often. He was aware that they had installed cameras at places like the sausage vendor's window and the toll machines, and assumed these cameras were there to catch scofflaws like him; after all, how many Buffalonians went to Brazil regularly? So he waited to use his remaining Brazilian coins, until he was at the machines on the other side of town, or he was buying cigarettes downtown; he made a point to be a little less predictable. But eventually the problem solved itself; he ran out of them, and his company stopped sending him to Brazil altogether, making him unable to get more. He was left with only the statuette, as a kind of souvenir.