One more question. I got started in this hobby fairly recently; after the X notes had already been discontinued. The link on Paul's main site posted above states that the BoC decided to discontinue X notes in 1996. But, scroll down, and the first reported "insert" notes seem to be FDZ and GPZ, which were issued in (correct me if I'm wrong) 2001.
So what was done about replacement notes between 1996 and 2001? Was there a 5-year lag between the announcement of the discontinuation and and the actual implementation?
One more question. I find it odd that insert notes of a later prefix are found in bricks and bundles of earlier ones (EYM found in EYK, for example.) Wouldn't that indicate that EYM was printed first, and was then set aside to be used as inserts during the printing of EYK? Why are EYM's being printed first? If, on the other hand, the EYK were indeed printed first, how did the EYM get in there? Did they really have 20 million notes printed and released between the time the defective EYK notes were pulled and the EYM's were inserted? That doesn't make any sense to me. :-/
One more question (sorry, last one): Has anyone found an insert note of the SAME prefix as the rest of the notes it was found with? e.g. EJE6525002 found in EJE1423200-1423299?
This whole "new insert" note thing seems to be a complete mess. I don't collect them, because the honour-system reporting method used by collectors who rummage through bricks is too prone to errors. Take, for example, the member of this board who found an entire brick (yes, a BRICK) of notes numbered in the insert range indicated in the most recent Charlton.* C'mon, an entire brick full of replacement notes? Something's wrong with the system.
I'm generally not one to believe in conspiracy theories. But here's my take on it (and to answer Jonathan's question above): It seems to me that the BoC is deliberately messing things up in order to thwart collectors from trying to find the pattern. (I mean, just look at HNH, what a mess!) Isn't that why they discontinued X notes in the first place, because people were opening up bricks and pulling them out?
Another problem with the reporting method currently in use by collectors: Did you really see the note come out of the brick, or was it found in the middle of those 16 $20 notes that you just pulled out from the ATM? How can you be sure that that note wasn't just put in there by the ATM stocker? There's just way too much opportunity for errors, whether innocent or not, and when errors sneak in, then the whole tracking method is whacked, and nobody knows for certain where the range really is.
For me, I won't be 100% convinced that any given note is an insert note unless I see it coming out of the brick myself, and that means having to see the plastic wrapper removed from the brick first in order to prove that it hasn't been tampered with. And even then, it'd be of little collectible interest to me anyway.
Well, there's my 2 cents on the subject.
* Link here:
http://www.cdnpapermoney.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=Inserts;action=display;num=1066060394;start=15
