georgepage

     A recent addition to my collection of useless hobbies is an involvement in the currency-tracking project "Where's George?", based at the website www.wheresgeorge.com, the site is devoted to the tracking of US paper currency. (There are also Canadian and Japanese versions of the site for those countries' currency.) A visit to the link above will give you the skinny on Where's George first-hand so I won't bore you all with the details here... you can check it out yourself.
     I got involved innocently enough. I had stopped at a cheese store in Wisconsin on my way home from my 2001 family reunion, and in my change I noticed a rubber-stamped message on one of my bills -- "Where am I going? Where have I been? Find out at www.wheresgeorge.com" Well, the whole idea of tracking currency was intriguing, so I visited the site, and entered the serial # of the bill, and found that the bill had originated not far from where I live in Chicago. I also learned that thousands of people do this, and I became interested enough to invest in my own rubber stamp, and am now a happy 'Georger' as they say.
     This is how it works in a nutshell: One enters the serial number of a bill, it's series (such as 1999 or 1996) and denomination ($1, 5, etc.), one marks the bill in some way that will encourage people to track it, and then spend the bill. My first Georged bills went out in late September, 2001, and I had my first 'hit' (someone who found the bill and entered the serial # into the database) in late October. Since then, more hits have followed. The pattern of travel is interesting, and ever-changing. I am hardly as fanatical as some when it comes to this, but it's an interesting hobby that requires very little of my time.
       To aid me in this, I have made maps to note where in the USA and in Illinois my notes go. They are color-coded for convenience. As I view the user profiles on Where's George.com I noticed that the vast majority of peoples' hits occur in their home state. Thus the Illinois county map. You can view these maps below. They are really for my own information, but viewers of my page are more than welcome to check these out... maybe some of you will become Georgers too!