Ah, the penny: that humble mortar in the masonry of American money. No other piece of U.S. currency would benefit from the expertise of a good psychiatrist as much as the penny. It is battered, bruised and beleaguered; it is derided as worthless; it is daily deemed a hassle and discarded as financial effluvium. Even the Detroit Lions are more highly-regarded than the penny.

Oddly enough, though the penny is so thoroughly downtrodden, it is not the runt of the litter. There is an even smaller denomination, but it gathers no criticism, perhaps because no one has spotted this younger sibling of the penny in the wild. However, many have seen evidence of its existence — almost always at gas stations. What is this unheralded, unhated, virtually unknown coin?

Why, it’s the 1/10 cent. The fractional penny. Or, less awkwardly, the frenny.

I have long been a skeptic of the existence of the frenny. I thought it was just a pricing game by the gas stations: “Our gas is only $2.19 … and 9/10 of a penny, but don’t you worry about that almost-penny.” (Of course, I thought games were supposed to be fun, too, so my credibility may already be suspect.) But then I went to my local Meijer, and my skepticism was challenged.

Like many other establishments, Meijer now helpfully provides a change-eating machine from Coinstar. The machine, with its near-insatiable appetite, ingests coins nearly as effortlessly as Simon Cowell ingests the tone-deaf. When the machine finishes its meal, it spits out a dejected, sobbing person. And when the Coinstar finishes with the coins, it provides a receipt that tells a cashier how much money to give you.

If you are a perceptive reader — and if you are, I suggest you find a perceptive writer to read — you may have noted that I did not say the receipt tells you simply how much money you fed the Hungry Hungry Coinstar. That’s not how these things work. The Coinstar isn’t a bank machine that generously smiles upon customers (because it knows the bank will extract its fees other ways); it’s a little green business machine. All those little gears and circuit boards need income to support their extravagant lifestyles, so it claims a fee for its services — a fee which is pleasantly proclaimed by a sign on the front of the machine.

The fee is not overwhelming, particularly considering the extensive social lives of modern gears and circuit boards; it’s just a little awkward. For the privilege of having your change counted and digested by Coinstar, you’re charged eight and nine-tenths cents per dollar. It actually has the fraction visual, too, like it’s better than those other morally bankrupt change eaters that have the audacity to charge 8.9 cents. Ignorant, unsophisticated curs, the lot.

When I see Coinstar’s fee, I am tempted to feed one dollar’s worth of coins into the machine, just to see if it might spit a frenny at me. For just a moment, I am distracted by the oddly fulfilling thought of holding an elusive frenny in my hand; however, I soon remember what a frenny is worth, and I realize I would have wasted eight and nine-tenths cents on the pursuit of currency that would buy me nothing.

Unless I could accumulate nine frennies. Then I could buy a gallon of gas.