When I read a news story such as the one in Thursday’s newspaper reporting that an unknown number of new George Washington dollar coins had been mistakenly struck by the U.S. Mint without the inscription “In God We Trust” and are fetching about $50 each online, my suspicions run amok.

Chalk it up to having spent too many years in the newspaper business, where an attitude of healthy skepticism is considered a requisite part of a lifelong bargain with the devil, if you will. But the mis-struck coin deal leaves me with the same feeling of having been hornswoggled as might a report that a limited number of postage stamps in a new issue had been “inadvertently” altered in the printing process.

Even as the kinder, gentler side of my brain tells me that both were likely honest mistakes on the part of some half-awake worker, the Doubting Thomas side screams that the errors occurred accidentally on purpose to fire up coin and stamp collectors.

The more so when I read that the first of the aforementioned new gold dollars sold online for $600 before it was known that an estimated 50,000 of the altered coins had gone into circulation in mid-February.

According to the newspaper article, the coins are now selling for between $40 and $60 apiece, which seems proof that there are people running around out there with lots more money than brains. Granted, this observation may be somewhat naive, coming as it does from a hopeless troglodyte who has always considered the value of a one-dollar coin to be roughly one dollar. Before inflation takes its cut.

In any case, the miscasting by the Mint’s Philadelphia operation seems sure to hype interest in the new gold coin, which, if it is anything like its predecessors, will be a total flop with the American public as walking-around money, but swell for squirreling away as curiosities for grandkids yet to be born. The coins are golden in color and slightly larger and thicker than a quarter, which shows that the U.S. Mint is not immune from repeating its mistakes.

Remember the infamous Sacagawea gold dollar coin, also slightly larger and thicker than a quarter, minted in 2000? Though not quite the disaster that the 1979 Susan B. Anthony silver dollar was (looks like a quarter, feels like a quarter, spends like a quarter), it will do until this latest bomb leaves its mark on coinage history.

I have several Sacagaweas and Anthonys, plus three Eisenhower silver-dollar keepers minted in the 1970s. Talk about a load. Fall overboard while lugging a bunch of those clunkers in the pocket of your jeans and you’d sink quicker than President Bush’s poll numbers amongst the Beautiful People of Hollywood.

Still, the “Ike” dollar pales in comparison to the size and heft of a couple of early 20th century silver dollars I have around here someplace, each roughly the circumference of a hockey puck, though thinner. The daddy of all silver dollars, this coin is like those the Cisco Kid might toss onto the bar of the saloon just before the gunfight erupts in one of those B-grade Wild West oaters.

But enough about coins, mis-struck inadvertently or otherwise.

A companion piece to the gold-coin boondoggle story in Thursday’s newspaper concerned another government mistake, this one by the U.S. Census Bureau. A spokeswoman confirmed that the bureau had accidentally posted personal information from 300 households in nine states on a public Internet site multiple times over a five-month period.

The information included names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and family income ranges, although no Social Security numbers. That would have made it too easy for the con men, swindlers and scam artists waiting to pounce on such a treasure trove of data. There is no evidence that the information was misused, a bureau spokesman said. On the other hand, there is also no evidence that it wasn’t, so there you are.

The inadvertent postings reportedly occurred while Census Bureau employees were working at home testing new software. Workers were to have used fictitious information to test the site, but instead mingled data from the bureau’s monthly survey for compiling national unemployment statistics. Oops.

The census and coin glitches, one more serious than the other, remind us how vulnerable we are to human or computer error in our daily lives. To dwell on the possibilities for disaster, however, is to render ourselves dead in the water, afraid to venture forth. So we keep on truckin’ like Larry, The Cable Guy, just trying to git ‘er done.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may contact him via e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.