Was that your own personal experiment with the Coinstar machine? I'm surprised you weren't carted off to jail. I recall some sort of scary warning about putting anything other than U.S. legal tender in the hopper. I'm way too easily cowed by rules and regulations.
How did the keys to an editor's house end up as Coinstar fodder?
We just had a giant jar full of change and whatnot--things we had emptied out of our pockets over the course of a year or two--and we brought it along to help pay for our trip to Cleveland. It was too much trouble to sort it, because there was a lot of it ($116 in actual American money!). Some of the items on the list we managed to grab and set aside before they went into the hopper. Others went in and were spat out the other end.
The key was just one of those random objects. I housesat for an editor of mine a while back, and that key has been cropping up around my house ever since!
I have always interpreted the sign that warns against chucking in "foreign objects" as a prohibition against attempting to fool the machine or jam it up...which of course we weren't trying to do. We're just very disorganized. 
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