Sunday, December 10, 2006

Wherein the United States of America makes a simple task much harder than it needs to be

One of the stores I was shopping at today accidentally gave me a Cuban coin ("cinco centavos") in my change instead of a dime, so I decided to see how much it's worth.

First I googled 5 Cuban centavos in Canadian dollars, but Google didn't convert like it usually does.

So I thought that maybe Google only knows the basic units, not the centavos. So I googled Cuban currency to find out what it's called. It's called the Peso. That part was fine.

Then I googled 0.05 Cuban pesos in Canadian dollars. But again, Google didn't convert!

So I googled currency converter, and got xe.com, which I used to use before Google started converting automatically. But I couldn't find Cuban pesos!

So then I googled Cuban peso conversion and got Yahoo Finance, which does have Cuban pesos.

Turns out my little coin is worth $0.06 Canadian. So I was inadvertently cheated 4 cents, but I did get a new coin I've never seen out of the deal. But it shouldn't have taken that many steps for me to find out what it's worth! I should have been able to find out in my first Google! Unless someone has a better explanation, I'm going to blame the US embargo on Cuba in combination with American domination of the internet.

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