BehindTheMedspeak (Money Edition): Meet the Currency Surgeons

Say what?

Long story short: "Currency surgeons" is the phrase the Wall Street Journal's headline writers used over Craig Karmin's article in a March 1, 2008 article about the little-known Mutilated Currency Division of the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

Most fascinating and somewhere I think I'd enjoy working.

In the video up top Karmin talks about his book.

Here's the story.

The Currency Surgeons: Where the Dollar Never Dies

While the Bureau of Engraving and Printing focuses most of its efforts on churning out more than eight billion notes a year, it also quietly excels in a lesser-known role: It is the world's dollar redeemer of last resort.

The bureau will accept just about any torn, chewed on, digested, discolored, blackened or shrunken dollar bill, no matter how bad it smells or how toxic its appearance. The bureau receives on average 200 to 300 envelopes, packages or moldy containers of mutilated currency each day. As long as at least 51% of a bill remains and can be verified as genuine, the bureau will, free of charge, refund the owner for the currency's full face value.

In 2006, the bureau handled 20,000 such cases and sent out checks worth $66 million — some to places as far away as China, Poland and Uruguay. Bureau officials say they are the only government organization in the world that performs such a function. So meticulous is the staff that they have been known to spend as long as two years analyzing a single package of gnarled currency.

"We don't care if it was in a fire, buried underground, water damaged," says Roscoe Ferguson, a 56-year old supervisor at the bureau's Mutilated Currency Division, which is based in Washington, D.C. "Maybe your dog ate it. Came out the other end. Clean it up a bit. We'll take care of it."

Across town, the Federal Reserve is in charge of disposing worn-out currency that commercial banks send it in exchange for fresh bills. About four million of these old dollars are shredded and compressed into small bricks each day, then usually sent to landfills, or packaged for the occasional souvenir for visitors to the Fed.

But it is the bureau's Mutilated Currency Division that has reimbursed individuals for their partially destroyed bills since 1862. New employees spend six months in training, where they learn how to reconstruct a note with the same painstaking precision a Swiss watchmaker spends assembling springs and coils to tell time. Trainees also are taught by the Secret Service to be able to spot counterfeit notes.

"We teach them how recognize the colors, the texture, the security designs of a note," says Lorraine Robinson, who runs the division and has been working with mutilated currency since 1974. "We teach them what color of black burned money turns."

The fact that such a department exists is testimony to the unusual durability of the U.S. currency and its unique cotton-linen composition. The bureau claims the bills' fibers are so strong that one could fold a note on the same crease up to 4,000 times before it will tear.

Nevertheless, Mr. Ferguson has seen a lot of unusual things happen to currency during his 17 years at the bureau. He is one of handful of elite specialists authorized to handle the toughest cases, known as Level Five. An ex-Federal Bureau of Investigation agent ("I left because they kept pushing me to get married") and a former Washington police officer, Mr. Ferguson (still a bachelor) has been with the bureau's Mutilated Currency Division since 1990.

If a fool and his money are soon parted, it is Mr. Ferguson's job to see that many of them are somehow reunited. He says the group once received a bag full of green strips from a man whose enraged wife had run much of his life savings through a paper shredder. A specialist at the Mutilated Currency Division spent two months piecing the ripped notes together like a jigsaw puzzle until every strip fit. The bureau sent the man a check for $30,000.

Several years earlier, an Iowa farmer dropped his wallet in a pasture and one of his cows turned it into a snack. The farmer slaughtered the cow, cut out its stomach and mailed the contents to the bureau. A couple of months later, he received a check for $600. In 2001, a Florida man attempted to dry his soggy bills in a microwave oven. "It wasn't a good idea," he wrote to the Miami Herald. "They caught fire." He received a check for $700.

The 20 people at the division work in close quarters, in a few rows of cubicles that could be mistaken for most any other suburban office, except for the equipment they each stock: cleansers, large magnifying glasses, knitting needles, knives, tweezers, scalpels and many cans of Lysol. Employees sit hunched over well-illuminated desks, gingerly pulling apart mutilated bills that look like damp tissue paper.

Most in the Mutilated Currency Division are fans of crossword puzzles and mystery novels, and their work offers something of the intrigue that you might find in a detective story or an episode of "Law and Order." For instance, a short-sighted bank robber once sent in bills that were stained with a pink dye. Instead of a check from the bureau, he was rewarded with a knock on his front door by the police.

One October afternoon in 2006, Mr. Ferguson recalled receiving several wallets from victims of Hurricane Katrina. "The odor was horrific," he said. But he was still glad people sent in those wallets. "You're helping people who think they've lost it all and are so grateful," he says. "I've received hundreds of phone calls and letters. I'm an instant member of the family afterwards."

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Karmin is the author of a new book entitled "Biography of the Dollar: How the Mighty Buck Conquered the World and Why It's Under Siege," just published and from which the preceding article was excerpted.

Why not buy his book?

I just did, and you know you can't go wrong by doing exactly as I do... or is it as I say?

I get so confused sometimes.

FunFact: Karmin has a blog which does not appear to be among his major priorities — there's just one post, dated January 2, 2008, and one comment, posted that same day.

Why not give him a thrill and let him know the power of bookofjoe nation?

Bonus: On his website you can download a sample chapter from his book, print it out, what have you — free, the way we like it.