WTF Month!

Whenever Willo who works in the tobacco industry for a living has had a bad day, the first words out of his mouth and way before he sits down to order a Guinness, are WTF! And WTF ladies and gentleman, is an abbreviation that the people of my parents’ generation will not grasp because it is a rude abbreviation.

January is just once such month - a WTF month! It is a month of misery – financial misery at that and a month where most people hang on for dear life as they scheme and devise how they will get through the month. It is an acute problem because all round the world, the people who work in accounts must have attended a convention and decided that in December, our salaries would be paid not at the end of December, but a few days before Christmas. Why they came to that conclusion, that I don’t know but whoever idea it was, he or she needs to be struck up to the nearest tree and shot dead.

It was the 80s and I was still living in England and gotten my first job with Olympia and York – a Jewish property developer who was causing quite a stir in the construction world then. They were orthodox Jews in that they would observe every holiday on the Jewish calendar and since it was the boom 80s and before Black September when the stock markets round the world crashed, we earned good salaries and our bonuses were something to make noise about.

At the end of each month – the last Monday of the month to be precise, our salaries had been credited to our accounts and the end of November was no different. In fact, in the four or so years that I worked for Olympia and York, our salaries were always on time. One second past 9:00am on the last Monday of the month, slot in your ATM card and there was the money.

With the festive period coming up, London was geared up – late night shopping, jingle bells ringing all over Oxford Street and wine bars full of late night revellers. And with that, there was a need to go to the ATM every other day. And as my November pay began to dwindle, as long as I had enough cash to scrape through the month until my December pay kicks in, there was nothing to worry about.

Then something happened. A few days before Christmas I raided the ATM yet again, withdrew some dime but when I got my balance slip, there was something amiss. I was way over credit. It has to be a computer glitch I thought to myself. I reinserted the card and yes it still gave me a healthy bank balance. And the same thing had also happened to Fiona who joined the company on the same day as me.

And boy was Fiona some hot blooded lass. She had a bosom that God had seemingly taken his time and thought in crafting and moulding. She had ‘bam oh my god what to we have here’ bosom – not like the average and boring ‘production line’ boobs that you see on many women. Then she had legs like escalators – you know the one that seemingly never end and the key to unlocking her Pandora’s box was going to be a dime. And since the bank had given me a bonus, the money required to open her box if you get my drift was not a problem.

Retreating to Hog in the Pound, a bar near Bond Street tube station, we sat down to the think of all the possibilities – why did we have such a healthy bank balances? And the only thing we could think of was that of a bank error.

Two days later when we checked to see if the bank had seen the error and rectified it, they hadn’t. The money was still on our accounts. After taking advice from friends, we all came to the same conclusion. If the money is still on our accounts by the end of the week, we were going to withdraw everything and then sort the bank out later – if they realised their error that is. And come the end of the week, that was exactly what we did.

And in keeping the 80s spirit of spend, spend and spend, we spent. We spent like there was no tomorrow. We would hit the stores first thing in morning and shopped till we could shop no more. And when we got home we would listen to the telephone answer service to see if there had been any calls from the bank wanting their money back but they never once called.

By the end of December, Fiona and I were beside ourselves! We had seemingly committed the perfect crime – something that better placed and well known crooks who were into insider trading failed to do.

With Christmas over and December coming to an end, though we were down to 100 Pounds between us, Fiona and I were not in the least bothered because the last Monday of the month was two days away and it meant payday. So we blew the 100 pounds.
Monday at 9:30am I was at the ATM but the message on the screen was strange. It read: “You do not have sufficient funds on your account to complete this transaction.” I tried three times and the same message came up. Vexed, I went into the bank to enquire and the girl at the counter confirmed the computer message. The following day with no pay credited to my account or Fiona’s, we stormed the accounts office demanding to know what was going on. Accounts Girl fiddled with her computer for a while then turned her screen round and said: “According to my records, you were paid on December 22nd.” To which I retorted, but we were supposed to have been paid two days ago.

After listening to our story she dropped the bomb shell and told us how December salaries are paid just before Christmas. In effect she concluded that we had stolen our own money from the bank!

Now we were broke and penniless. And for the next one month we survived on baked beans, mouldy bread and drinking warm water mixed with sugar. The final straw came when the electricity people came round and cut off the power. And being winter, the water was ice cold and the flat froze. At night it was so cold that we had to sleep in four layers of clothing to stay warm and having a shower in ice cold water was not an option. And for three weeks we managed to survive – but only just for when we were finally paid at the end of January, I was so hungry that when I put ATM card into the machine, I was not thinking straight and the card was swallowed. I had to spend another night hungry and eating cold beans in a cold flat. And to make things even worse, Fiona had taken her ‘bam oh my god what to we have here’ bosom and escalator legs to Paul who had an abundance of cash to get him through the WTF January month!