The song says “rainy days and Mondays always get me down.” Not me. I like Mondays. For me Mondays are like opening birthday presents. You never know what might be in the brightly wrapped packages and little card envelopes.

Because I happen to like Mondays doesn't mean that come Friday afternoon I am not quietly muttering TGIF to myself. However, Mondays in the rhythm of this editor’s life are very important.

Take the mail. The stagecoach reaches Iola, Wis., and unloads on Mondays. I probably get more snail mail on Mondays than any two other days combined. At certain times of the month, it is probably closer to any three other days of the week.

It is interesting to skim through the club bulletins, fliers and hard copy letters to the editor that come my way.

Monday morning e-mail is also a treat. Messages have been accumulating since I left the office on Friday. I try not to take my work home with me on weekends. Call me a dinosaur but I still try to maintain some boundaries between work life and home life.

When I am at shows or on vacation, Dave Kranz reads my e-mail and takes action for me. He knows the rules of the publishing road as well as I do and he can act in my place. He can even sign replies “Dave,” and no one would know the difference. We don’t really do that, but if we ever get someone so hot and bothered that they have to have a reply from “Dave” while I am, say, in Central America, Dave Kranz can provide the reply. Fortunately, that necessity almost never happens. Most people are just as happy to deal with Dave Kranz as with Dave Harper. They are glad there are real, live persons on this end of the electronic highway.

Even though the Internet was supposed to make news a 24/7 happening, in real life it doesn’t happen that way. Much like matter in space, news tends to glom together (Yes, I just read a bio of Albert Einstein).

There is the Wednesday effect. That is for phone calls. For some reason, few people seem to want to phone on any other day of the week. While I am trying to lay out Page 1 of Numismatic News, I  get deluged with calls from people who want to find out who wrote a letter that appeared three months ago, or they want to know what MS-65 means in the Coin Market price guide.

Serious people tend not to call on Wednesdays, unless of course, they are returning phone calls from the staff. Why is that? I don’t know. Perhaps there is a self-help book somewhere that says answers are more easily obtained on Wednesdays. Otherwise, why this happens beats me.

But as I said earlier there is a rhythm to the life of an editor. Some of it is imposed by our own internal schedule. However, that schedule was set up in the first place to most nearly reflect the rhythm of the hobby.

Fortunately for me, people still need to eat and sleep at regular times and that means my life is a little more predictable than the 24/7 potential news cycle would imply.

Are you stupid? I don’t think so, but over the years I have made some observations about human behavior.

The new Washington plain-edge dollar error is a wonderful discovery. It gets people looking at the new coins in hopes of making a marketing killing. One fellow has already showed me a check for over $4,100 that he earned by selling a group of plain-edge Washington dollars to a dealer.

That kind of money is enough to gain anyone’s attention – and it has. But that also is a problem.
When a valuable error is discovered, people look at their coins. They then notice other things that are a little odd or different. If a plain-edge coin can be worth so much money, why not the mysterious line on another dollar that kind of looks like a spear? Why not a line caused by a die crack that looks like a crease across the forehead of the first President?

Why not, indeed.

At root is the significance test. Most of these anomalies, which the numismatic hobby calls errors, fail this test, but when coins can be posted in online auctions, a plausible story can earn a profit while actual research or learning is just too much trouble especially when it leads to finding out why a coin has no extra value.

The recent run of postings of so-called upside down edge lettering got so much online momentum despite repeated news stories that they are not errors that the U.S. Mint had to jump in and issue a consumer alert to inform would-be buyers that the lettering is random, with roughly half up and half down.

Are the letter orientations on the Washington coins collectible? Absolutely. The difference is notable. The Professional Coin Grading Service announced today that it is slabbing both and correctly advised collectors that neither is inherently worth any extra money over the other.

For errors in general, keep in mind that most coins have something wrong with them if you look hard enough. They are the products of the Industrial Age and they are prone to industrial quality control problems.

Clever names for errors usually mean that the error is not significant enough to stand on its own. It needs a marketing push. Don’t fall for it.

I ask again, “Are you stupid?” If you are not educating yourself about what makes some errors valuable and most others valueless over time, the answer might be yes. Grading services want to help you. The hobby’s error experts do, too. But you also have to want to help yourself. For more information, visit www.pcgs.com