It was December 31, the middle of the holiday season, and I found myself (to paraphrase Monsieur Rabelais) subject to a kind of disease which in these days is called lack of money. I had been working like a Guatemalan field hand for the past two months but still I had nothing in my pocket to show for it and only £14 in the bank.
With the last gasps of a credit card I had been able to purchase the single Christmas gift that would delay my introduction to the divorce courts, but now even that method of commerce was lost to me. My regular paycheque, which should have been direct deposited into my account on the 26th , had yet to materialise. Phone calls, e-mails and text messages to my Fascist employer had all gone maddeningly unanswered. What kind of unconscionably sadistic Scrooge would deny his star employee a pleasant and felicitous holiday?
A supplementary cheque for journalistic work, supposedly mailed on December 21 from Nicosia, that great distant metropolis a mere 12 hours away by Postal Service donkey, also had not come through. Needless to say, I was not Mr Wonderful, not Mr Happy, nor Mr Easy-going, nor Mr Here’s-a-little-something-extra-for-you, my friend. When someone messes with my money, money that I have earned fair and square, I start thinking of the speediest way to burn down their house and sell all their progeny into white slavery.
I couldn’t buy groceries (thank god the family here is large and generous to a fault), couldn’t buy petrol to go anywhere, couldn’t even buy cigars, and worst of all, I was down to half a bottle of a decidedly inferior scotch (it’s name starts with J and ends with B). To say I was at wit’s end is to lie, because I no longer had any wits about me. Not even enough to locate the local recruitment office for the Foreign Legion in hopes of procuring a small advance.
Finally, at 11:30 the mail was delivered and it included among the bills and stop service notices, the aforementioned supplementary check, and praise the gods, it was an immediately cashable cheque.
I grabbed my bankbook and ID, hoofed it to the bank (fuel gauge on empty) and joined the end of the surly queue. Have you ever noticed that the same people in the queue who complain about how long it’s taking and how the cheap bank really should put on more staff when they know they’ll be busy, are the same good people who when they finally get their turn at the teller window will jibber-jabber and BS with everyone behind the counter. They will then pull out 27 dog-eared documents for the teller to examine and have translated all their phone, electricity and water bills, while the rest of us simmer in agony.
Forty-five minutes later, wiping the rabid foam from my jaw, I approached the teller, my hot little cheque all endorsed and at the ready. Before I could get a word out, the smiling demon – noting the paper remittance – chimed, “Only cash today. No cheques.”
“Sorry?”
“We are only dealing in cash today.”
“Okay. I just want to cash this cheque, thank you. I have an account here.”
“But we can’t take any cheques today. You can only deposit or withdraw cash.”
“Why?”
“Our system is down because we have to convert everything to Euros.”
“You’re joking. You waited until today to work on the computer system? Why didn’t someone get it ready yesterday, or the day before.”
“Yesterday? That was Sunday, and the day before was Saturday. We don’t work on the weekends. You can come back on Wednesday and maybe the system will be up by then. Next.”
It took all the fortitude I possessed to refrain from saying something derogatory, if not eternally damning, about “this country”.
In other, albeit more modern, states, such as Bangladesh or Uganda, they would have an entire back-up computer system for emergencies like this. Or, quite simply, some genius in management would suggest that they come in over the weekend and get everything ready so that on January 1 they could merely hit the switch and be ready to Euro rock and roll. But never in wait-until-the-last-possible-nanosecond Cyprus.
I propose that the Cyprus government allocate funds to display at all its airports and other entry portals large official notices, chiselled in marble for time eternal, quoting Mark Twain’s dictum (composed after his famous trip to Nicosia), “Welcome to Cyprus. Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after tomorrow.”
But for the nonce, for cash, what could I do? I checked the Internet again for the promised direct deposit, found nothing but zeros there, and went out to rob some church poor boxes. At the end of the day I had enough shekels to buy a happy meal for two at the golden arches and, sipping from our giant Diet Pepsis, we danced the night away across the moonlit, broken beer-bottled Yermasoyia strand. Chronia Pola!
