Piggy Banks

They changed the Greyhound bus terminal in Guelph from being a portable to being a part of the old Via Rail station. Five or six years ago, Guelph had a pretty solid Greyhound terminal, but they had to get rid of it in favour of building a new city bus terminal and boarding station. Before this, all the city buses would meet downtown, but they had no proper terminal. So it was just a shift in priorities from having a good inter-city system for a good intra-city one. Fair enough trade.

The portable was supposed to be a temporary arrangement until they could establish a better Greyhound station, but five years later they were still using the portable. After all this time, they finally make the change. And what do they do?

The Via Rail station is right next to the city bus terminal. So they just changed it to encompass the city and Greyhound buses as well. It's now "Guelph Central Station". They didn't have to build anything. Why did they change the location of the Greyhound terminal for five years, just to move it back to where it was, and use a building that was already there and used for transit? It seems like an incredibly simple solution.

Kitchener uses their Charles Street Terminal for both types of buses, so it's not like an original idea. Central Station is better than the portable anyway.

Guess what I have?

Piggy banks! I have limited free debit transactions, so I try to use cash as much as possible. Because of that, I produce a lot of change. And because I don't really use anything under a dollar, it collects quickly. Before this, I've just used a tupperware container, but these piggy banks are a huge step up aesthetically.

The large one is for quarters, nickels and dimes. The small one is for loonies and twonies. The smaller one is kind of the standard size for piggy banks, because they're generally made for children, and children are poor. But I'm a man, and I need a man-sized piggy bank.

They'r not the porcelain piggy banks you have to break to open. Both of these are stainless steal, you'd have to take a hammer to them. They've both got a plug on their underbelly, which you can open to get your coins. They don't follow the philosophy of forcing the collector to break the bank to receive their earnings, which makes a person think twice about committing to the action, and thus encourages free-spenders to save. This works for me, because I've no problem saving, these are just glorified tupperware containers.

You can kind of see me and my room in the reflection in this picture, ha.

When I brought these home, my neighbour was like, "What'd you get, Gryphon? A... uh... a piggy bank, eh? What... what you going to use that for?" And I was like "What do you think? I'm going to use it for its intended purpose of collecting coins" and she was like Ah... that's good".

I don't know, I guess she thought I was too hard-edged for a piggy bank. But when I showed my roommates, they were like "Aw, man, that's sick bro, where'd you get it?" And then we had a whole conversation about our preferred types of piggy banks.

In fact, every male in my age category that I've shown my piggy banks to has shown only appreciation.