Where's George

By now, chances are good that most people have stumbled onto www.wheresgeorge.com. I came across it two or three years ago and was mightily amused that someone had created a software program to track exactly when and where a given U.S. dollar bill had been.

If you've never visited the site, just enter the serial number from your bill, along with your zip code and you'll learn how far your dollar has traveled and how long it took to get to you. For instance:

-- Series 2003A:  This bill has travelled 13 Miles in 267 Days, 13 Hrs, 40 Mins at an average of 0.05 Miles per day. It is now 5.9 Miles from its starting location [in Portland].

-- Series 2006: This bill has travelled 194 Miles in 189 Days, 6 Hrs, 42 Mins at an average of 1.0 Miles per day. It is now 194 Miles from its starting location [in Moses Lake, Wash.].

-- Series 2006: This bill has travelled 277 Miles in 195 Days, 11 Hrs, 7 Mins at an average of 1.4 Miles per day. It is now 277 Miles from its starting location [in Lewiston, Idaho].

The program works only if someone has entered the serial number initially. You can tell you've got a "live" one because people will stamp the website address on the bill itself.

I'm content to find out the above information. For super-users, there are a lot more tabs to click on, including Forums and "George's Top 10" users -- each of whom has entered more than 250,000 bills in the "bill finder" software and come up with more than 60,000 hits apiece. The No. 1 guy on the list has entered a staggering 1.75 million bills and been rewarded with nearly 300,000 hits.

Can you imagine putting in that much time? To each his own, I suppose.