Canada's new currency

... is stupid.

It's basically plastic.

So they've changed over $100, $50, and $20 bills to the new polymer kind (though there are still the old paper sort floating around, and they are still valid currency). They also have shiny new loonies ($1 coins) and toonies ($2 coins) out.

The problem with this?

No vending machine I've tried accepts the new bills nor the new coins. They just go straight through. Laundromats don't accept the new coins. Nothing that isn't a human person will accept the new currency.

But the worst part of the new bills?

They will melt in the dryer, or in the sun. And they stick together like crazy, so I've had approximately a billion people at work tell me they were paying for something with a new $100 bill only to realize, hours later, they were a bill short because two hundreds had stuck together.

I get the idea that these are harder to counterfeit. I get the idea that waterproof money is totally cool (they have it in Mexico, it's neat). What I don't get is it melting at high, but normal temperatures. I don't get coins that are the wrong weight or too shiny for machines to recognise them. I don't get that I have to be super careful when counting out money to make sure no one accuses us of pretending not to notice extra bills.

(And we had a woman the other month contest her credit card charges after she'd stayed here. We had her signature, we had her on camera, but we still managed to lose because someone had been silly enough to enter it manually. So it isn't that far-fetched that there may be people out there trying to get something for nothing.)