It’s a given that the Susan B Anthony Dollar has a horrible design.  I find myself currently in the possession of a Susan B Anthony.  I needed to break a five for bus fare, so I asked around a bit for five one dollar bills, waving the five.  Eventually I found someone, a family where one person pooled together where one pulled out two ones, and another pulled out her two ones, and somewhere along the line somebody threw in what I thought was a quarter.  I groaned slightly at what I thought was the loss of seventy-five cents in this transaction, sort of rationalizing it mentally as a balance-of-nature thing due to breaking somebody’s one for public phone coins with all the change I had at that time — eighty cents, perhaps — meaning I’d be down — what?   Fifty-five cents?  I’m out a generic cola!
A couple days later, I looked and saw that it was a goddamned dollar.  Looking down at it, the quarter fits into the serated edge, and counting the sides of the coin — a bit tricky, it appears to have eleven sides.

Which brings me to the question: Um. Why? Eleven sided coins? Why? It is nearly a circle, but not quite a circle. If I were designing the Susan B Anthony, I think I’d have, like, maybe a hectagon. Or probably six sides — a sestagon? (Hexagon, dammedit!)  That would make it distinctive enough to be able to separate from the quarter, and would make it thus functional.

Conspiracy mutterings have it that the Susan B Anthony dollar was designed to fail — can’t honor them feminists, or something. I don’t know. Susan B Anthony is sort of the safest suffragist to honor — something of the equivalent of Booker T Washington. But really. Eleven sides?

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