A Georgia man who received his final paycheck in over 90,000 oil-soaked pennies from a disgruntled former employer has experienced a change for the better, finally cashing out his huge chunk of coins.
Andreas Flaten, of Fayetteville, Georgia, originally found a pile of 91,515 pennies on his driveway in March with a note attached to them that read “fuck you.”
According to interviews given by Flaten to local media, the penny pile was the work of Miles Walker, owner of the A OK Walker Autoworks body shop in Peachtree City, Georgia.
Walker had reportedly denied Flaten his last paycheck and only acquiesced after Flaten contacted the Georgia Department of Labor.
Coinstar, known for its coin-cashing kiosks, came to Flaten’s assistance after his story went viral. The company picked up the heap of coins, which Flaten had stored in a wheelbarrow with wheels that had deflated from the staggering weight, and gave him $1,000 in cash.
“It was a shock and frustrating to be paid in this manner, and it was an extra burden that the pennies were covered with an oily substance,” Flaten said in a press release. “I was spending an hour or two a night trying to clean the pennies and probably only cleaned off about $5 worth.”
Jim Gaherity, Coinstar CEO, said the company processes “approximately 41 billion coins annually — so picking up 91,000 pennies was all in a day’s work.”
Flaten’s girlfriend, Olivia Oxley, who had previously posted footage of the oil-soaked coins on social media and called Walker an “asshole” who made “unnecessary comments about my boyfriends daughter and just [was] an all around dick,” celebrated the coin conversion on Instagram and shared a local CBS segment featuring Flaten and Jeff Lail, the head of North American operations for Coinstar.
“We’ll take this directly to our processing partner, and it’ll be cleaned and wrapped and counted and re-circulated,” Lail said of the huge coin mass.
Walker, Flaten’s former employer, has been accused of creating a hostile work environment by other employees, who said he ripped up paystubs in front of workers and demeaned female staff. When questioned by local media about the strange penny saga, Walker called Flaten a “fucking weenie.”