Via Owen, I discovered this odd little story about a man being cuffed to a pole for paying a $114 installation charge with $2 bills:

He remembers the cashier marking each bill with a pen. Then other store personnel began to gather, a few of them asking, "Are these real?"

"Of course they are," Bolesta said. "They're legal tender."

A Best Buy manager refused comment last week. But, according to a Baltimore County police arrest report, suspicions were roused when an employee noticed some smearing of ink. So the cops were called in. One officer noticed the bills ran in sequential order.

"I told them, 'I'm a tour operator. I've got thousands of these bills. I get them from my bank. You got a problem, call the bank,'" Bolesta says. "I'm sitting there in a chair. The store's full of people watching this. All of a sudden, he's standing me up and handcuffing me behind my back, telling me, 'We have to do this until we get it straightened out.'

I can understand a bit of skepticism and someone pays for something with sequential $2. But even so, this is plain odd to me. First of all, from what I understand the margin of counterfeiting lower bills is so low that the threat of a counterfeit $1 is tiny (one of the reasons that they aren't updated like the larger bills are). Now this was a $2 instead of a $1, but if someone was going to counterfeit money, they'd want it to be as discreit as possible and $2 are the opposite of discreit. Third, it's not as if he was some guy off the street. They had information on him and knew where he lived. No one is going to cut and run for $114 when they had a car to install a stereo system on. Like I said, I can understand a bit of "this is odd" skepticism, but all that is required is making a note of who the customer is so that if there is any problem, you can take care of it then without the bad publicity of a story in the Baltimore Sun.

I'm inclined to cut customer representatives a lot of slack, but someone should lose their job over this.