$20,000 US.. mostly in singles.
Thursday, August 14, 2003, the date of what would come to be known as the famous 2003 North America blackout.

I was on the road, in my old job as an arcade technician, and head of a crew of three. We were doing some work in several locations the company had in New Jersey, repairing machines, counting coins, replenishing the stores' change, and bringing the stores' cash receipts for the week back to the main office on Long Island, New York, which also happens to be where I live.

Fast-forward a few hours and a few miles, and we're on our way back to Long Island. At some point while we were on the road, the power went out. We were on a long stretch of parkway with no traffic signals, so we didn't notice until we hit New York City, and as we proceeded to the Bronx to drop the first of our number off at her place, we realized that the power had been out for some time. Our company-issued mobile phone had no signal, so we continued home to Long Island. We found the traffic surprisingly light, but of course the whole thing was new to us. The rest of the Northeastern United States had already been dealing with the situation for two hours. (We might have been less ignorant had we been listening to the car's radio rather than a cassette, but I digress.) Eventually, our phone caught some service, enabling us to check on our families and get in touch with our boss, who informed us that everyone in the company was being sent home. Good news for them, but bad news for us, who had been planning to unload several thousand of the company's dollars from the company car's trunk into their safe.

I no longer remember exactly how much cash it was, but on a typical Jersey run I believe we usually came back with anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000, more during Summer when the arcade trade is busiest. This was the peak of Summer, so I'd guess we had at least $20,000, possibly $25,000, mostly in single dollar bills, in a pile of canvas money bags. If you've ever seen stereotype bank robbers in movies running away with canvas money bags emblazoned with big "$" signs, you know the bags I'm referring to. In reality they don't have the "$", but they often have the name and address of the bank they came from.

As ranking officer in that group, I was going to be expected to take responsibility for these bags of the company's cash, and keep them safe in my own house until things blew over. I was not at all pleased with the idea - I love blackouts and would be damned if I was going to miss out on enjoying one just to watch a pile of the bosses' money. Besides, everyone was freaking out. The Nazi Taliban from the Bad Part of Town could have shown up to loot my house, or my cats might have urinated on it, or worse. So I managed to get hold of my supervisor, and just before his phone battery died I called in pretty much every favor he owed me (and a few he didn't,) and convinced him to meet me at my place and pick up the cash.

(As a service to myself, you readers, and my potential burglars, I must point out that I no longer have that type of job, and handle nobody's cash but my own meager scrapings nowadays.)

The other tech and I arrived at my slowly darkening house just before sunset. We piled the money bags into a corner of my living room, and he left. It was weird - as most honest people who handle large amounts of money at work will tell you, you stop really seeing it as currency after a while. You get used to the fact that it's not your money, and it just becomes an abstract thing you deal with at work. However, staring at this pile of cash in my own increasingly dark living room while listening to increasingly unsure radio reports, and needing to keep all the doors and windows open in an attempt to vent a house with no fans or air conditioning on a hot Summer night, I was forcefully reminded what I had. The highest point of the pile was half as tall as me, and thanks to my lousy night vision and my overactive imagination, the pile seemed to slowly spread out toward into the middle of the room. As time passed and passed, I cared less and less for the situation. There were no real lights, but my mind kept throwing a spotlight on the cash, and I couldn't see much else. Very film noir.

A couple of hours later, my supervisor showed up, and we unloaded the cash into his trunk in the pitch dark night. I couldn't resist the urge to hum the "Mission: Impossible" theme while we did so. He left on a 45 minute drive over unlit highway to his place (which I believe ended up taking him about 3 hours,) I felt amazingly relieved, and my sister and I got some flashlights and left to do some nighttime blackout exploring.
( Rob T Firefly talked, like, William Shatner, on, Sat 24 Jun 2006, 1:06, Reply)