[geeks] Now for something completely geek

[Joost van de Griek]

On 8/27/06 12:28 PM, Mike Meredith wrote:

> On Sat, 26 Aug 2006 18:41:39 +0200, Joost van de Griek wrote:
>
>> To be fair, a couple of years back we (the EU) changed from a ton of
>> different currencies to the Euro. And while some morons are still
>> trying to adjust, most people coped. Eventually.
> 
> Come to think of it, the 'almost europeans' have had to cope with a new
> kind of money (still pounds and pence, but not pounds, shillings,
> pence), and metrification. Lots of moans, but it hasn't caused the end
> of the world.

There's more countries who have made such a change. I remember my parents
coming back from a holiday in France and telling an amusing story of some
old lady in a village shop asking the clerk how much the total she was
quoted (in francs, still) would have been in "anciens francs" ("old
francs"). Imagine the trouble that poor old woman must have these days with
the double conversion, first from euros to francs, then from francs to
anciens francs!

At least in Turkey they had the sense to simply slash six zeros off the
currence, so a new lyra is one billion new lyra. Scared the hell out of me
the first time I went to Istanbul and was charged a million lyra for a
bottle of mineral water, though. All I had on me was two fifties...

> The amount of FUD we get to hear about the Euro is astonishing. As if a
> nation could lose it's identity because it changes the currency.

Word to your mommy.

Although some of it quite nicely illustrates the original point of this
discussion: when the euro was just introduced, I got a lot of spam, targeted
at Americans, on how to acquire your own "euro dollar" and own a piece of
history. Apparently, the genius that thought up that scam was one of those
rigid-minded people that couldn't imagine any currency being called anything
but "dollar".

,xtG
.tsooJ
-- 
You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things
that make you want to live to be a hundred.
 - Woody Allen
-- 
Joost van de Griek
<http://www.jvdg.net/>