Thursday, June 19, 2008

How many pesetas do you still have?

It is very common to receive little papers when getting out of the metro, advertising different services like painting your apartment, changing your garden fence etc. This seems to be a good way to get new customers. At least it seems to work good enough in order to put somebody (usually the girlfriend/wife of the painter) giving out these papers in the morning. Usually I receive those papers to put them directly into the next bin, where already thousands of the same papers are waiting. Sometimes I even think that the girl that distributes them at the end of the day just takes them out of the bin to distribute them again the next day.

Anyway, here you see a photo of the paper I received yesterday. The person is offering to do different repairs in your house, painting stairs, painting apartments, tiling your floor etc. I was about to throw it away when I saw the prices! He'll paint your apartment for 95,000 pesetas!

Great!

But what if I do not have any pesetas left, because as everybody else I turned them over to the Bank of Spain to exchange them for Euros in 2002. And although you can still turn over pesetas in order to change them for Euros, you cannot do it the other way round. So, in case I want to paint my apartment, where the hell do I get those 95,000 pesetas????
Just in case you wonder how much that is, some banks still offer a tool on their site to do the conversion (http://4w.cajaduero.es/atclient/simula/eurocalc.asp).
95000 pesetas are 570 Euros.

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