Zimbabwe Absurdity

I guess I was really naive. The guy in the bakery had said that they would have bread yesterday morning, and a few other pastries too.  I was really tired of getting just rusks and somehow envisaged strolling in and getting, well, just about anything. Be here at eight he’d said. Well, it seemed like about 40 other people had the same idea so a camera would have been more useful than the shopping bag I’d packed. So I’ve resorted to looking up bread recipes on the internet and baking my own, quite successfully too I might add. Well, my supply of flour has run out now so I’m not sure what I’ll do next.

Earlier this week there was a supplementary budget, brought out  to tackle the world’s highest inflation. It did not of course do anything particularly imaginative but at least nobody that I know was expecting anything else. Most notably the “official” exchange rate went from 250 Zim dollars to 1 US dollar to 30000:1. It is still off the black market rate by a factor  of 10 so it is not going to do much but at least those getting obscenely rich off their connections at the Reserve Bank will have to spend a little bit more for the privilege.

On Friday I again fell foul of the daft cheque deposit regulations handed down by the Reserve Bank. You might recall from a previous post that one cannot deposit cheques of $50 million or more, but there is no limit on electronic transfers. So, a customer gave me two cheques totalling  56m. Not a problem I thought, I’d just go ahead and deposit them. Wrong. I was informed that I would have to deposit them on different days. If I deposited one at 4.30pm and the other at 8 the next morning they would both be banked at the same time, that’s OK, but even using different deposit slips on the same day is not acceptable. No, they could not just keep one slip separate and stamp it for me the next day.