Find a penny

[asakiyume]

Lesser-known lore relating to roadside coins.

If you find a penny and you *don't* pick it up, more good luck accrues to it. So, the more people walk by a penny (or other coin) and don't pick it up, the luckier it becomes--but only if they deliberately don't pick it up. If they simply fail to notice it, then it doesn't count.

So you can use this as a good-luck savings account: See a coin, but don't pick it up. Wait a number of days proportional to the amount of good luck you'd like to collect. As with all investments, there are risks. Someone else might pick up your coin.

littlemoremasks told me that it's only good luck to pick up a heads-up coin. It's bad luck to pick up a tails-up one. If you want to make good luck possible, you should turn the coin over--but you can't then pick it up. You have to leave it for someone else.

I'm not sure littlemoremasks is right about the bad-luck aspect of tails-up coins. It could be his way of ensuring no one picks up tails-up coins that he's investing luck in.

Comments

[ivy]

I hold both the luck-adding and the tails-flipping properties of pennies, but I've also never tried to game the system there. [laughing] It wouldn't have occurred to me! One pokes the bear of fairy tale logic at one's own peril.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I've only **contemplated** gaming the system. Opportunistic imagination. But I haven't actually put it in practice. Too greedy to pass up a good-luck coin when I see it.