last word
Hard Cash
T
Nury Vittachi on why withdrawals
from the Bank of Dad need to hurt
he train was so tightly packed that when I checked
my current account balance on my phone,
four people breathed in sharply and gave me
sympathetic looks.
But then the girl left of me started playing Candy Crush and
everyone’s attention shifted to her.
With people and cameras everywhere, there’s no privacy
any more. If you need to adjust your underpants or unpick a
wedgie you have to book a hotel room. “I’d like to book a twin-
bed no-smoking room for 30 seconds, please.” “Certainly sir.
For a security deposit, we will require your credit card, house
deeds and firstborn child.”
But stories of technology and humanity can create warm
and fuzzy feelings, I learned from two recent news reports.
At the end of May, a jam-packed train on the way to a
college in New York got stuck. Everyone was in a bad mood.
One of the passengers was student Jerich Alcantara, dressed
in university robes to receive his diploma. “I would like to thank
you all for coming to my graduation,” he joked. “It means a lot
to me.”
The carriage full of strangers laughed, someone found
celebratory music to play, a diploma was zapped to his
phone, and suddenly it was a party. Someone filmed it for the
Internet, of course, and the result was that his graduation was
witnessed by millions of people.
Then came a news report on tech-savvy accountant David
Goodwin, who used geek know-how to get away with the
perfect crime 100 times in a row.
He turned up at a busy, charity-minded church in Northern
Ireland with his laptop and offered to check the accounts.
Since the members donating cash and the needy spending it
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were highly trusting, he found it easy to transfer big chunks of
money to his own accounts.
After two years stealing charity donations from the church,
he’d committed his 100 th crime and felt unstoppable.
But then the church had a guest speaker: a reformed
criminal. Everything the man said hit Goodwin like a
thunderbolt from heaven.
Deeply moved, Goodwin spent the next few hours
creating spreadsheets showing exactly how he had
committed each of his 100 crimes, and then walked to the
local police station, where he opened his laptop and said:
“Look what I’ve done.”
That story also produced a warm, fuzzy feeling – which
evaporated when I saw the next news report in my inbox.
Researchers say the amount of invisible, intangible money
being spent every day (clicking to buy stuff) had overtaken the
amount of actual physical money being spent every day. Coins
and banknotes will disappear, pundits say.
This is bad.
My main tool for impressing on my children the value of
money is the extreeeeeemely slooooooow way I count out
their pocket money every week, an expression of agony on my
face. Sometimes I actually weep blood.
A quick click on a screen to transfer cash is not the same.
It fails to convey the pain that needs to be associated with
money moving away from Dad’s pocket in any direction.
I’m going to do all my financial stuff on the train from now
on. At least I get a bit of sympathy there.
Nury welcomes you comments and ideas at his Facebook
page: www.facebook.com/nury.vittachi