Having written today’s title I’m looking forward to Day 288, because I just realised I will be able to do the “too gross” joke. However, that is still quite a way off. (Those of you too young to have counted in scores and gross will just have to stand round and look confused while two or three stand round showing signs of mild amusement).

The day at work started with me looking for a small piece of paper I had lost the previous night whilst trying to sort out my phone. That took me twenty minutes and has convinced me to tidy my desk more often. I then progressed to answering emails, including one from someone who was happy with two coin sets we sent and someone else who asked for a discount and ended up spending over £1,000.

Some mornings are better than others.

That was the high point of the day. I managed to load quite a lot on eBay and was getting on well when, just twenty minutes before closing time, someone called in with a coin collection. He said he’d spoken to us last week, which he probably had, but he hadn’t bothered to make an appointment, as asked.

The collection was a dreadful thing and had obviously been stored in poor conditions, as a lot of the coins had turned green and were sticking to the inside of the plastic pockets they were stored in. This didn’t matter, as most of the coins were virtually worthless anyway and many others were modern ones that he could still spend. It was the sort of collection where the time spent taking the coins out of the pages would have exceeded the value of the coins. Despite this, we persevered, sorted out anything good that we could find, offered him over £500 (fortunately there were a few better pieces) and gave him back the spendable coins.  listened to him tell us how he thought the coins were worth more than we had offered and, bit by bit, put them back in his bag.

In the middle of this someone else came in without an appointment and proceeded to get in the way before spending £2.

In the end we left twenty minutes late (which we don’t get paid for) with fingers that still taste of copper despite hand washing and nothing to show for all that effort.

The end of the day was definitely not as good as the beginning.