Monday 13 July 2015

in the bank

I banked the beekeepers' money from the Tendring Show first thing this morning, after spending most of yesterday counting and double counting it, and digging through files to see how the results compared with last year.  A big improvement on 2014 is the answer, but we'd better not get too cocky about that, since sales were only back to where they were in 2013.

Journalists, analysts and futurologists who predict the imminent demise of cash seem not to have thought about voluntary organisations and summer fairs.  We managed with four tin cash boxes and a tupperware container.  Would we run to five hand held terminals for swiping people's contactless cards?  I doubt it.  And would I agree to take responsibility for the results, and any ensuing arguments about their transactions?  Definitely not.  At least when somebody hands you a five pound note you and they both know that money has changed hands.

The count took all morning, and anybody who ran their own shop would probably have done it much faster, but I don't often handle much cash.  I did spend two days of my life preparing, double and triple checking a two hundred and fifty million pound programme trade in medium cap UK equities, and once signed off on a sale of BP shares that ran into the low billions, when the investment company I worked for was reducing its weighting in oil stocks, but most of my own shopping is done with digital money.  So I am not used to having the best part of sixteen hundred pounds swirling around on the dining room table.

My first step was to remove the floats, note for note and coin for coin, and restore them to where I'd borrowed them from in the first place, forty quid to the Systems Administrator, sundry coppers to the change pot in the study, and the balance to the store of accumulated beekeepers' tea and raffle money I'd been delaying banking specifically so that I would have a supply of pound coins for the show.  Then I counted the tea and raffle money again, and was very happy that it came to the same amount as it had before I took the floats out of it.  Then I counted the contents of every cash box in turn, and for each individual box and the tea money I made a note of how much there was in twenty pound notes, how much in tens, and so on right down to the one pence pieces.  Then I worked out how much I should have across all the pools of money in each denomination, added that up, and was very happy indeed when it came to the same amount as the grand total for the separate totals for sales of cakes, honey and candles, and squash, plus candle rolling, bee colouring, and the pre-show tea and raffle money.

Then I checked all my calculations again, and checked the money again as I bagged it up in accordance with the instructions on the bank's plastic bags, twenty pounds in one or two pound coins, ten pounds in ten pence pieces and so on.  This is why it took all morning, but I was pretty sure at the end of it that I was right.  Which is why I was not best pleased when the bank teller claimed that I was ten pounds short, and demanded to know what I wanted to do about it.  She recounted the pennies in front of my eyes, which was not at all helpful since pennies clearly had nothing to do with it, and made incomprehensible jottings on a piece of paper.  I asked if she could tell me which part of the payment was wrong, and she elaborated that it was the ten and twenty pence pieces.  I checked that there was not a stray bag of change left in my two layers of plastic carriers, although I already knew that there wasn't, and began to wonder if I could possibly have left a bag on the dining table, though I knew that I hadn't, or else got confused between bags made up to ten pounds and those made up to twenty.

Despairing as to how I'd made a mistake when I'd taken so much care over it, I had got to the stage of meekly getting a ten pound note out of my purse, and the teller putting it in a drawer, before she discovered the missing bag of ten pence coins sitting on the cluttered little desk in front of her. Even then I had to remind her to give me my ten pound note back, and there was a very long queue behind me by the time we'd finished.  Still, given I've been gloating that we get free banking, I can't really grumble if something we don't pay for turns out not to be very good.


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