Remember when you were a kid and you'd count up all those Coins and place them carefully into those little paper rolls? Then you'd take them to the Bank, and the smiling teller would take them and hand you real dollar bills?

Remember that?

I do, which is why I cleaned out our two coin mugs, the bowl by the front door and the car, counted out all those stinky coins, rolled them up and lugged the heavy sticks of money in my already heavy bag down to the Loop this morning. I figured it would be easier to just go during lunch than try to run down to the one in our neighborhood after work. Sure the line would be long at lunchtime, but it would be a piece of cake.

But it turns out that Bank of America, or at least the branches in the Loop, don't take coin rolls anymore. The teller looked at the rolls as if I had handed her an astrolabe or a scroll of parchment. After consulting with a guy who looked only slightly older than her, she explained, "We don't have the machine."

What machine? There wasn't a machine when I was 10 years old! This used to be a LaSalle branch, and apparently, Bank of America "took" their machine away. Will there be another machine? Who knows. But there isn't a branch in the entire Loop that can take a roll of coins and turn it into cash. Her solution: "You could take them to a TCF bank."

Yeah, but, uh ... I don't have an account with TCF! I have an account with BofA, the biggest bank in the world, as far as the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce is concerned, and you're telling me I can't get money in exchange for ... money!?

Honestly, most of our money is with a certain Internet bank. the only reason we even have this piddling account with a bricks-and-mortar bank is for exactly this kind of service. I can't just hand my laptop a handfull of coins and expect a 20 dollar bill in return. Apparently, I can't get that from a Bank of America teller either.