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So I’m sitting at work, sipping a lemon herbal tea from the Flavia machine in the breakroom.

I drink about two-thirds of it over half an hour or so, and then happen to look into the cup – and there’s a quarter at the bottom of my tea.

Twenty-five cents? In my fancy hot lemonade?
Apparently, it’s more likely than I thought.

Now I can be pretty sure it wasn’t in the cup already, as the cup was from a stack of upside-down disposable paper coffee cups of the sort one finds in corporate breakrooms next to Flavia machines, a stack which I had just replenished from a new sleeve. However, I’ve been away from my desk a few times, and the area is reasonably high-traffic, which means anyone could have dropped a coin into my drink if that’s their idea of a good time.

But why, though?

There is another possibility – the refrigerator in the breakroom has an ice dispenser, and I used it to put some ice in my tea. If the quarter was left for some reason in the works of the ice-maker, then I could concievably have been paid an ice-taking bonus at that point.

But why would someone leave a quarter in that thing?

Either way, it comes down to someone in this office having a strange way of sharing the wealth.

While writing this, I finished my drink and shook out the coin. Gross? Maybe a bit, but I really like this tea, and I had already been drinking coin-water for an unknown period of time so the damage was done.

If nothing else, I now have a bright shiny 1993-dated mystery quarter in my pocket. This is a good thing, because I frankly wasn’t expecting any sort of holiday bonus this year. I wonder what I shall spend it on.