Fountains

March 22, 2004 - Coins in the Fountain

Close your eyes and make a wish. Throw a penny into the water and your wish will come true. Some would say to be careful what you wish for. You might get more than you wished. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. If you wish upon a star your dreams will come true. And then good fortune will rain on you like pennies from heaven.

The dedicated staff was thinking of wishes this weekend, when we went to the two big malls of Santa Barbara (Paseo Nuevo and La Cumbre) to count the coins in the fountains. Easy as pie, we thought. Or was it just wishful thinking? As we stood gazing into the sparkling pools, listening to the tinkling sounds of the tiled fountains, we developed a plan. We would divide the fountains into manageable sized grids, and systematically count the number of coins we saw in each grid section. Makes cents?

La Cumbre’s fountain was a straight tiled grid that we could easily divide and conquer. Paseo Nuevo’s fountain proved a little trickier. The tile surrounding the fountain is in a hexagon (six sides) pattern. The only way to get an accurate count was to count the number of coins in each individual tile. But we don’t call us the dedicated staff of edhat.com for nothing. There we stood, sans our trusty clickers, staring like Jacques Cousteau fixedly into the watery depths.

Surprisingly enough, no one walking by asked us what we were doing. We find this commonly to be the case. Santa Barbara is just a live and let live town. The day was getting a bit warm. We started wondering if maybe we could get away with a little dip in the fountain. No one on the dedicated staff was feeling quite that dedicated, however.

At the end of our count, we walked up to the management office at Paseo Nuevo. Our instincts told us to follow the money - we were curious just what happened to these monetary offerings to the wish gods. We learned two things at the office. First, the same company manages both La Cumbre and Paseo Nuevo, and second; every so often, the money from both fountains is collected and donated to charity. Nice.

The question of which fountain had more money was not a question at all to mall management staff. They knew that La Cumbre would be the winner, however they did not know why. The dedicated staff has a theory. While we did find more coins in La Cumbre (526 to 448), what made it the big money winner was the number of silver coins we found (18 to 2). Our theory is that there might be a little late night coin fishing at the downtown mall.

The final money count was $6.78 at La Cumbre and $4.61 at Paseo Nuevo. That adds up to a total of $11.37.

Edhat subscribers incorrectly favored Paseo Nuevo by a 4 to 1 margin as the richest fountain. Among the contrarians Edzec was the closest with a fine guess of $11.50. Edzec’s wishes will come true. He/She can choose between movie tickets, coffee card, or $11.37 in pennies.

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