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Posted Exchange Rates Posting Date: Jul 20 2008 10:45PM When you walk through the concourse at any major airport, there is always a little glass booth containing a serious looking young man or woman dressed in something approaching a business suit, but not quite getting there in a I-forgot-to-put-on-my-tie-this-morning kind of way.
The purpose of this booth is to exchange currencies, one for another. If you’ve just landed in Toronto from Seoul, you can swap all your won for dollars. At Heathrow Airport in London, you can step off your flight from Tel Aviv and turn shekels into pounds. You can turn your Panamanian balboas into a fist full of dalasi for your trip to The Gambia, or you can convert your wallet’s worth of Haitian gourdes into a stack of inti for all your Peruvian purchases. It’s a magic little booth, it is.
The most incredible part of its magic, though, is that the conversion process is governed by the all-important “posted exchange rates.” With a quick glance at a tidy display board of country flags and numbers, you can calculate exactly how many roubles you’ll get for your rupees or how many talas you’ll take for your takas. It’s a precise machine, this currency exchange booth.
Sadly, it only works with currency. Nowhere else in our lives do we have the miracle of posted exchange rates. And for everyone except international currency traders the concept of the posted exchange rate could not be more uselessly applied than to currency. Who really gives a crap about knowing to the second decimal place how many kwanza you’re going to get for your zloty?
What we really need is converter of human currency, a pocket-size machine that instantly translates one type of personal favour into another, one wrong into restitution, one unit of freedom into the appropriate number of chores. For that type of calculator, I would pay at least 1,000 Brazilian reais or the equivalent number (10,451) of Vietnamese dongs.
Let’s say, for example, that you’ve helped your buddy move three times. Once, you were both young and he owned no furniture that was not from Ikea. The next time, it was him and his girlfriend, who had more books than a library and decided she wanted to relocate in the middle of January. The third time was on short notice because your buddy got kicked out by his girlfriend after finding someone else’s pink panties in the back seat of his used Saab. The good side of that coin was that all he needed your help with was getting his stuffed moose head down the stairs to the Saab.
So, if you did all those things, and all other favours between you have come out even over the years, does he have to lend you $5,000 if you ask? Does he need to help paint your entire house over a weekend? Should he take time off work to pick you up at the airport after your honeymoon? Should he single-handedly build you a new deck on your cottage? Is he obliged to let you date his sister? These are big questions, and that’s why we need a human currency converter.
If you mow the lawn on a Sunday instead of watching football, have you earned enough wife-points to go bowling with the boys instead of watching the finale of American Idol? If you host family Christmas six years in a row, should your deadbeat brother start paying for the turkeys? If you let someone with just a handful of items go before you in at the supermarket check-out, is she obliged not to ask for a price check on the lettuce she thought was on sale for 15 cents off?
The human currency converter has the answers.
Oh, and just in case you’re interested, since I will be the programmer of the first human currency converter, the answers in the above scenarios are no, yes, yes, yes, no, yes, yes, and yes, she definitely has to take the fifteen-cent hit to get you to the cash register as fast as possible.
I’m telling you, for this machine, I might be willing to spend as much as $1,000 … Canadian, which is about 10,220 Estonian krooni. |
