From tracking our spending in Money Diaries to strategizing about how to ask our bosses for that long-overdue salary bump , we're pretty astonished by the way our bank accounts always seem to be at the tops of our minds. And even though most aspects of our lives are inevitably impacted by the ups-and-downs of that precarious cash flow, we'd never stopped to consider how physical money (so retro) is actually made. That's why we headed to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing for a tour of all the absurdly intricate processes that produce those crisp, possibility-packed notes in our wallets. Turns out, it was way stranger than we'd ever expected.