Bank clerk spends 6 months to count 1.2m coins by hand

A German bank worker who spent half of 2017 hand-counting 2.5 metric tons (5,500 pounds) of coins finally finished his monumental task this week, according to public broadcaster NDR 1.

The coins had been collected by a former truck driver over 30 years of his travels and bequeathed to his family. He had packed the roughly 1.2 million coins into hundreds of freezer bags.

The coins were in one- and two-cent denominations — the smallest units of the Deutschmark, which was the currency of the Federal Republic of Germany until the introduction of the euro in 2002.

While Deutschmarks can be sent in for exchange in

Counting the coins by machine was not possible as some of them were rusted and stuck together

the mail, the decreased man's family had to take the bags to the bank in a van after the man died.

Germans can exchange D-marks for euros at local branches of the German Central Bank

Counting the coins by machine was not possible as some of them were rusted and stuck together, Wolfgang Kemereit, the diligent employee of the Oldenburg branch of the Deutsche Bundesbank (German central bank) , told NDR.

He took more than six months to count all the coins, which he did alongside his regular bank duties. He needed around one hour to tally up the contents of a single bag.

"I held each piece in my hand," he told NDR. "I quite enjoy doing such things, so in that sense it wasn't a problem."

The coins totaled up to some $9,400 (about N2.9 million), an unexpected inheritance for the family of the decreased man.