Kleingeld seems to be a national obsession. Everybody wants it.
Bums on the street in Vienna ask you for your change.
Store clerks practically reach into your pocket to dig around for that extra 10 cents so they don't have to break your twenty.
So, what do you say after you're accosted by some homeless man at the U-Bahn entrance reeking of stale beer and asking you for whatever change you just put in your pocket after buying your subway ticket?
In America, you'd say, "Leave me the hell alone and get a real job, you alcoholic good-for-nothing!" or, "Back off or I'm calling the cops," and that would be more or less acceptable behavior in, for example New York.
And, you know, maybe that's what the Austrians say, too...unfortunately, I am not so quick-witted in German as to verbally slash to pieces some scruffy, shriveled old man waiting in a train station for some tourist to drop X amount of coinage (hopefully a Euro) out of ignorance and confusion.
To tell the truth, I have a hard time doing this in the States. So, basically, what I end up doing is giving in, and letting the poor bum have whatever I end up digging out of my pocket (as long as it is not a whole Euro - I'm not that naive) and even though I know he's just going to buy more booze with it, it gets him off my back.
And, by the way, I feel a lot less guilty about it in the US because a) I have a better grasp of what the bum is trying to say, and b) I know that, digging through my pocket, the largest single coin I'm likely to produce is a quarter, which isn't going to buy much anyway.
On to store clerks. I have much less patience with them, because their search for exact change is out of pure laziness. God damn, is it that hard to do math in your head? Don't you ever want to foist all of the 2 cent pieces off on some customer who buys something for € 3,02 and hands you a € 50 bill? And then professes not to have the 2 cent?
Or, really, would it kill them to have a "Leave a Penny" jar sitting on the counter? Or is that too American? And who the hell came up with the 2 cent piece? How is that more efficient than 1 cent? Does it have to do with some tax-inclusion provision, or is it a holdover from the Middle Ages? I mean, come on. That one's hard to believe, considering the currency was created in the late '90s.
But whatever. I'm sure Europeans have plenty of gripes about the dollar bill.
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