Satisfying Order

I finally did it. I've been meaning to do this for a long time, and earlier this week, I got my act together and went through with it. Admittedly, it did help that I finally had the necessary components, and with the worsening weather as of late, that had been an issue. But I had the components, I had the time, and I had the motivation.

I organized my collection of state quarters.

This may not sound like much, but it was something that I have been thinking about on and off (mostly off) for some time (a few years) now. I took me the better part of an hour to go through, writing the names of each state on individual notecards, and then going through my collection, matching quarters with cards, and securing the quarters with tape to their respective cards. It was slow work, but now it is much easier (not to mention possible) to search for and locate individual quarters, and also I have a much easier time seeing which quarters I do and do not have (still missing Maine and Mississippi).

It should probably be pointed out that my old system was just having the quarters in a smallish plastic box. While this did make containment and transport easier, there was the problem of tracking the progress of the collection and checking for redundant quarters. The old way would consist of looking through the quarters in the box, and about halfway through forgetting what I was looking for, and which ones I had already checked. By about this point, I would start over, finally finding out that, in fact, yes, I have that one already.

Early on, the system worked just fine. But as time progressed, and my collection grew, the system became increasingly inefficient. I'm pretty sure I talked about this earlier. When I was starting off, I had far fewer quarters than I didn't have, so the likelihood of getting a redundant quarter was low, but increased with each new quarter I added to the collection. When I hit 25 out of 50, that was the halfway point; after that, there were more quarters that I did have compared to those I didn't, and now the chances were now that any new state quarter I had was more likely to be one I had already found.

Sometimes, we need to take a step back, I look at the systems that we are using. Do they work? If so, how well? If a system is working poorly or not at all, it would probably be a good idea to examine it and consider the options. Can it be fixed with minor alterations, or will it require major alterations? Or should it just be scrapped and replaced with something else entirely?