Most of my adult life, I've been told that home ownership has its quirks.

There's always more work to be done, more problems to be solved, things that need fixing.

When I bought my house, I found a few arcade game coin slots on the walls.

I figured, of course, the previous owner must have been really into the whole retro aesthetic,

and maybe they had some arcade cabinets to go along with it.

I only ever saw the house after they moved everything out, empty house.

But I don't remember seeing these coin slots on any of the walls.

A few days go by, my wife and I sorted through all of the boxes at the important stuff,

and I crack open a beer, pretty much the only thing we had in the fridge so far.

And a coin slot, just a little past the fridge down the front hall, catches my eye.

It looked to me like it was glowing.

I chalked it up to be in some sort of trick of the light because I would have noticed a glowing

coin slot there before. I went over to inspect it. We really got a good look at one of these things.

Once we're all settled in, other coin slots would get my attention and I'll go about removing them,

but at that moment I decided I needed to focus my attention on this one in particular.

The coin slot has, it was glowing, all right, there was no weird light reflection as far as I could

tell, I took a long sip of my beer and then touched it. I don't know what I was expecting.

The coin slot had the exact same feel that it looked like it should. I wrapped my fingers around

the edges, tried to pry it loose a bit, give it a wiggle, but it wouldn't budge.

There didn't seem to be any obvious way to uninstall the coin slot without doing some

serious damage to the drywall. It's asked for later, I suppose. I pushed the plastic coin return

button a few times and an intense sense of satisfaction washed over me. Maybe that was just the beer

...